Sitemaps and robots.txt in PrestaShop

The sitemap

The XML sitemap is the list of URLs you want Google to know about. PrestaShop generates it with the Google sitemap module (gsitemap) or with more complete SEO modules.

• Include active products, categories, relevant CMS pages and, if you have one, blog posts.
• Exclude pages with no value: cart, account, search, filters.
• Regenerate it automatically with a scheduled task, especially if the catalogue changes often.
• Submit it in Search Console and declare its location in the robots.txt.

The robots.txt

PrestaShop generates it from Shop Parameters > Traffic & SEO > Generate robots.txt file. By default it blocks folders and parameters that should not be crawled.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?order=
Disallow: /*&order=
Disallow: /*?resultsPerPage=
Disallow: /carrito
Disallow: /pedido
Sitemap: https://tienda.com/1_index_sitemap.xml

Robots.txt is not noindex

Blocking a URL in robots.txt stops it from being crawled, not from being indexed: if it has external links, it can appear in Google without a description. To remove a page from the index, use noindex and let Google crawl it.

Check the coverage

In Search Console, the sitemaps report tells you how many URLs you submitted and how many are indexed. A large gap points to a quality, duplicate or crawling problem.

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