Sitemap and hreflang

The sitemap is your store's table of contents for search engines. Hreflang makes sure Google serves the right language version in multilingual stores. You control both here.

Extended sitemap configuration (Basic)

What is it good for? By default Shopware includes everything in the sitemap. Often you want to control this – for example exclude landing pages or tell search engines how important certain content is. This improves how thoroughly and how up-to-date Google indexes your store.

How to use it: In the Configuration you define:

• which content types are included (products, categories, landing pages),

• the change frequency (e.g. weekly) as a hint about how often content changes,

• the priority (0.0–1.0), i.e. the relative importance.

Pages set to noindex via the robots tag are automatically excluded from the sitemap.

Regenerate the sitemap manually: Under SEO Tools → Sitemap you see when the sitemap was last built and how much content it contains. Via Generate sitemap now you trigger a rebuild. It runs in the background via the queue – even for very large stores the process does not block the Administration. After a short while, reload the page and you see the updated timestamp.

Image sitemap (Premium)

What is it good for? Product images can bring in visitors on their own through Google Image Search. An image sitemap specifically submits your product images to Google.

How to use it: Enable the image sitemap in the Configuration. You define how many images per product are included (max. 10) and whether the cover image is listed first. The images are embedded into the sitemap with the matching Google image tags.

Hreflang management (Premium)

What is it good for? If your store serves several languages or countries, Google needs to know which page belongs to which language. Without this information your language versions compete with each other, or Google shows visitors the wrong variant. Hreflang annotations solve this.

How to use it: Under SEO Tools → Hreflang you link the language and country versions of your content across your sales channels. The plugin outputs the matching hreflang annotations automatically in two places:

• in the HTML head of every storefront page,

• in the sitemap.

This way Google understands the relationships and serves each visitor the correct language version.