Setup Sitemap.xml in Magento 1 multistore

Table of Content

General information

While Magento is a powerful e-commerce platform there are some drawbacks which you should do manually on every new site. For example, we cannot configure one sitemap.xml for one store with different store views, these should be three different files. It brings some misunderstanding how all should work together.

System configuration

Go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Google Sitemap > Generation Settings and enable Sitemap generation:

Go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Sitemap and configure options: Use Tree Like Category Sitemap, Minimum Lines per Page
Switch to the Search Engine Optimization Tab and Enable the option Autogenerated Site Map

Sitemaps directory

Connect to your site with your favourite client (FTP/SSH) and create sitemaps/ in the project root directory.

Sitemap configuration

Navigate to Catalog > Google Sitemap > Add Sitemap
Add a sitemap.xml file to the configuration:

Such as we have several store we past **/sitemaps/** in **Path** field which we created before, this will be main directory for all sitemaps file.

Configure others sitemaps. It can be like as on the screenshot

Sitemap generation

Now you can generate sitemaps manually by clicking Generate button in Action column or setup crontab and your sitemaps will be generated automatically.

Register sitemaps in robots.txt

You can just generate the sitemap.xml per store.
In your robots.txt add the path to the sitemaps, for example:

# Sitemap
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemaps/sitemap_en.xml
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemaps/sitemap_ua.xml
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemaps/sitemap_ru.xml