Sitemaps are another form of feed that can be created using the product feeds. The platform provides the ability to create a separate sitemap feed for each search engine. A sitemap breaks down the complexity of the web site structure into specific subject areas for search engine web crawlers to efficiently index sites to maximize benefit and improve search rankings.
It is a good practice to provide a regular feed to search engines, to ensure incremental changes to the site are updated.
When significant changes are made to the site, such as new product/ranges or new content, it is particularly important to provide the search engine with the XML file, so that it can digest the information quickly. Waiting for search engine robots to visit and crawl the site, can take time and lead to missed sales opportunities. Furthermore, when a product is retired, it is important to tell search engines about this too, so that dead links can be removed from the search engine database. If you have a replacement product, you may wish to handle this through a re-direct (see previous section) until the new product has been fully indexed and has achieved a ranking of its own.
