Multiple Website Sitemaps?

Question

I have multiple websites running under different domains from a single Magento installation.

The first website is a broad scope store selling everything the business offers and two additional websites sell limited specialised products of different categories.

When I create a sitemap for website2 or website3 it contains a complete list of the catalog under the new URL.

This isn't ideal as I don't want Google to associate those domains with every product that website 1 sells, I only want it to generate items that are actually for sale (i.e. categorised into the root category for that store / store view).

Is this possible? Because otherwise the functionality seems a little pointless if it just changes the baseURL then lists the entire Catalog URL list.

Answer 1

You can avoid the listing of all product in your 'small' websites by removing the unnecessary products from those websites. When you edit a product you have a tab called Websites. If a product is not set to appear in one of the websites, it won't appear in the sitemap either.
I assume you have more than a few products in your website so editing each one manually is not an option. You can remove them from a website using the Update attributes functionality from the product grid, or if you reaaally know what you are doing you can remove records from the table catalog_product_website and reindex when you are done (but I don't recommend this. and if you try it please back-up first).

Answer 2

I just ran into this particular issue recently myself except instead of having multiply websites I have different store under one website. I went ahead and set the products which were not suppose to be visible for a particular store to Not Individually Visible in that particular store view with an import. This fixed the issue of the products showing up in the Magento product sitemap and fixed the issue of Google coming across duplicate pages and indexing both.