Hi Amanda,
The plugin automatically creates an XML sitemap of your products, which can be found in the root folder of our plugin. You can copy the URL of the sitemap there and add it to whatever services you use (e.g. Google Search Console).
If you’ve changed the permalink base for your products, then we have an option in the SEO area of the Options tab that lets you change the URL base in the sitemap too.
Thanks so much for your reply.
Can you point me in the direction of where to find the root folder? Thanks!
Hi Amanda,
You can find the root folder of UPCP here: wp-content/plugins/ultimate-product-catalogue
Hello again…
This is all I can find with respect to a url within that file:
“http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9”
Am I looking in the wrong place? I’m looking in the upcp-site-map.xml.
Thanks!
If you go to “wp-content/plugins/ultimate-product-catalogue”, there is a file called “upcp-site-map.xml”. That is the sitemap that is automatically created by the plugin. In there, for each product, there will be an entry like:
<url>
<loc>product/my-product-slug/</loc>
<lastmod>2018-05-01</lastmod>
</url>
The <loc> part is the URL. It’s relative. It doesn’t show the full URL.
Here’s what I am having trouble with…
I’ve got multiple catalogs on my site, each with a different URL paths. So, for example:
http://www.mysite.com/catalogs/cat-name-1-here/
http://www.mysite.com/catalogs/cat-name-2-here/
Etc.
How can I get the UPCP sitemap to show the full and correct product URL path for each unique catalog? All I can see are two options:
<loc>http://www.mysite.com/product/product-name-here/</loc>
or
<loc>/product/product-name-here</loc>
Neither version includes the middle section of the URL.
Thanks.
-
This reply was modified 8 years ago by
Snap2015.
Hi snap,
The entries in the automatically-created sitemap are for the individual product pages. There are no automatically-created entries for the catalog pages themselves. If you’re using a custom product page permalink base, then you can also use the “XML Sitemap URL” setting (in the “SEO” area of the “Options” tab) to set the base URL in the sitemap.
If the product pages from your different catalogs have different base URLs, then, unfortunately, there is currently no way to have it automatically create the sitemap with product URLs that have one base for one catalog and a different base for another catalog. If this is the case for you, we’d suggest that you manually create a sitemap that has all your different product pages, with their different base URLs.
Thanks for your response. I think I’ll have to go with Plan B, creating a custom xml sitemap with the full and correct product URL paths, although I’m not too thrilled about it. It seems like a huge oversight on the development side, to be frank. The plugin has “catalog” in the name, which suggests that end-users might actually want to create, you know, catalogs. Having the full file path in the URL & sitemap allows products to be indexed based on type, brand and category (a silo structure) – in short, it’s better for SEO. Maybe there should be a multiple permalink base option available in the admin so that we can avoid having to create our own sitemaps in this situation. Just a suggestion.
Follow up question…
I have now manually created a sitemap for the product catalogs with the full and correct URL paths.
Is there a way to safely disable the built-in xml sitemap for the UPCP plugin? And can it be done in a way that doesn’t need to be repeated every time the plugin updates?
Obviously, I no longer need it and I don’t want for it to be crawled by Google.
Thanks.
Hi snap,
Unfortunately there’s no option to disable the xml creation functionality from the admin panel at the moment. So what we could suggest you is, that you could enable the SEO for the sitemap file you manually created in your Google Console and remove the automatically generated sitemap from Google search console if you added it there. Or, if you still want to disable the generation of the sitemap via the plugin then you could comment the following line from the UPCP_Create_XML_Sitemap.php file found in “ultimate-product-catalogue\Functions” directory.
//file_put_contents($Url, $XMLString);
Hi
I am trying to submit the upcp site map to google webmaster tools but can’t figure out its URL.
I found the upcp sitemap in the root folder and I’ve tried to submit to google mydomain/upcp-site-map.xml but no luck
loisgriffin365, it’s in the plugin folder, so the url should look like this:
(yourdomain)/wp-content/plugins/ultimate-product-catalogue/upcp-site-map.xml
