First step in this process would be to create a VF page for this sitemap. The content type of this sitemap would be ‘text/xml‘. Simply add this to the contentType attribute of the <apex:page>. Next create a controller for this sitemap and return a list of all the VF pages from a function in this controller. This can be done with the help of following query:

SELECT id, name from Apexpage where id in(SELECT SetupEntityId FROM SetupEntityAccess WHERE SetupEntityType = 'ApexPage' AND Parent.Profile.Id = :UserInfo.getProfileId())

Loop over the list of sObject that we received and then add the names to the list of strings. After this go back to the VF page and create the following tag in it.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"></urlset>

Between these tags create an <apex:repeat> element iterating over the list of VF pages that we got earlier and add the following code in the repeat element.

<url>
<loc>{!$Site.BaseUrl}/{!page}</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>

This will create a sitemap file with the priorities of 0.5 each. Alternatively you can create a map of string to decimal containing the priorities of each page and use them in this page.

Now we won’t be actually overriding the default sitemap, rather we will be redirecting bots to the new custom sitemap that we created with the help of robots.txt. As we know that we can create a custom robots in Salesforce.

For the blog on creating custom robots.txt go to this link: https://wedgecommerce.com/setup-robots-txt-salesforce-site/

Now in this robots.txt we need to add a line that is:

SITEMAP: {!$Site.BaseUrl}/sitemap

With this done, when the robots will crawl the robots.txt they will find the following URL to the sitemap, and hence will not go to the default sitemap URL.

That’s all about creating the custom sitemap in Salesforce site, for any further queries feel free to contact us at:

https://wedgecommerce.com/contact-us/

Or let us know your views about this blog in comments section below.