To get your store noticed and listed in Google’s search engine, your website needs to be verified and have its sitemap submitted. Submitting a sitemap provides search engines a list of your store URLs, making it easy for them to crawl and index your pages.
Site verification is the process of proving that you own your site. Verifying your site with Google gives you access to its private Google Search data as well as access to specific Google tools and services, like Search Console and Google Shopping.
Verifying your website with Google requires a free Google account. If you don’t have an account already, you can sign up for one.
Verifying Your Site with Google #
You’ll first need to log into Google Search Console and add your site as a website property. You’ll need to specify the property type. We recommend URL prefix as it provides multiple alternative methods of verifying your domain.
You’ll be prompted to verify your domain via HTML file; however, we recommend using HTML tag, listed under other verification method. Click the HTML tag to expand the section. Copy the meta tag that is presented.
In your Store dashboard, go to Settings › Insert headers and footers.
Paste the meta tag you copied from Google into the “Scripts in Header” field and Save your changes.
Return to Google Search Console and click Verify. You will see a success message, indicating your site is now verified.
Note that meta tags may take some time to apply. If Google Search Console doesn’t find the record immediately, wait an hour and then try to verify again.
Submitting Your Sitemap to Google #
Submitting a sitemap helps make sure the search engines know about all the pages on your site. It’s especially helpful if you have a large number of products that may not be discovered by normal crawling methods. You’ll first need to verify your site with Google before submitting your sitemap.
Log into Google Search Console. In the top left, select your property/domain, then click Sitemaps in the left navigation menu.
You’ll be prompted to enter a sitemap URL. Every Ecomly store automatically creates and stores an XML sitemap that can be reached by adding sitemap.xml to the end of your store’s URL — for example, https://example.com/sitemap.xml. Enter the full URL of your store’s sitemap and click Submit.
To ensure that you set up your sitemaps correctly visit this link https://rankmath.com/kb/configure-sitemaps/
You will see a success message, indicating your sitemap was submitted successfully.
Using the URL Inspection Tool #
You can use the URL inspection tool to see how Google crawls and renders a specific URL from your site. It simulates the natural crawling process of Googlebot, can help identify if a page is crawlable by Google and if any resources (like images or scripts) are inaccessible. See Google’s documentation for more information about test results.
Enter the full URL path of the page you want to inspect then hit enter — for example, http://www.example.com/cameras/nikon-d7000
When the request is complete, the page will show the success or failure of the request and some basic information such as:
- how the URL was discovered
- crawl date, robot blocking and a successful crawl
- if indexing is allowed
FAQs #
Will my trial store be indexed by search engines?
All BigCommerce trials are set to private when they are created, thus keeping search engines from indexing your store while still under development, and prevents the public from browsing your store until it’s ready for launch.
Google Search Console is showing the warning “Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt” for some of my URLs. What should I do?
By default, robots.txt file blocks URLs that pertain to customer checkout and accounts. These URLs are purposefully blocked for security reasons. The warnings can be disregarded if you have not altered the robots.txt file. The warning is only meant to notify you that some URLs are blocked and if it was intentional.
