An XML sitemap is a website file on your website that lists the pages you want search engines to index. It also helps search engines understand your website structure, and they use it when re-indexing your website to see the newly added pages that are supposed to be indexed.
You can find our Sitemap feature in the Indexing section of the main menu:
In Shopify, the Sitemap is automatically generated for each store on the platform. It is accessible by adding /sitemap.xml after your domain name in the browser, after the domain name of your store, for example - www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml
You cannot exclude specific pages from the sitemap in Shopify, however, by using Smart SEO you can decide which pages are included in the Sitemap.
How to add your Sitemap to Google Search Console through Smart SEO
To submit your Sitemap to Google Search Console with a single click in Smart SEO, you have to connect Smart SEO to your Google Search Console. To do that, click the Connect to Google Webmaster Tools button on the Sitemap page:
In order for the feature to properly work, you need to give Smart SEO permissions to your Google account.
If you have not added your website to Google Search Console yet, you will see a Add website to search console button, that will allow you to add your website to Google Search Console:
How to manage your sitemap with Smart SEO
Once you are connected, you can manage which pages in your store are included/excluded in the Shopify sitemap. There are 5 sections - Products, Collections, Blogs, Articles and Pages:
To exclude a given product, all you have to do is go to the Products tab and click the Exclude button. And to include it back, simply click Include:
Excluding a page here does two things:
Removes the page's URL from your sitemap.xml
Adds a noindex tag ( <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"> ) to that page's HTML, telling search engines not to index the page or follow its links
If the page is already indexed, adding the noindex tag alone won't remove it immediately. Google needs to recrawl the page first. To speed this up, you can use the Removals tool in Google Search Console to temporarily hide the page from search results (up to ~6 months) while Google recrawls and picks up the noindex tag for permanent removal.
Once you are done with managing your sitemap, go back to the Sitemap tab and click the Submit sitemap to Google button:
You can always check the last date/time when the sitemap was submitted.