Search visibility for a catalogue site starts with two unglamorous things: a sitemap that lists every page that should be indexed, and URLs that resolve to their canonical form without a redirect. Both have been rebuilt and re-verified this week, alongside the submission workflow that tells search engines about new pages as they publish.
What the sitemap now covers
The sitemap previously listed the top-level category boards and the product and article pages, and missed two whole families of pages. It now includes every category page that carries items, at every level of the tree rather than only the boards, the full buy channel with its category and listing pages, and the supplier pages for every company with a declared supply scope. The category URLs were also corrected: the old format pointed at a path that returns a 404, and the corrected format resolves to the live category page, so the listings that were being submitted were listings a crawler could not fetch.
Canonical company pages
The supplier pages were the second correction. The sitemap previously listed a company URL form that redirects to the company directory, which meant several hundred submitted URLs resolved to a page that was not the company profile. The sitemap now uses the canonical company URL that the site itself generates for each supplier, verified to resolve directly to the company page with its title and content intact.
Submission and verification
New product and article pages are submitted for indexing through the IndexNow protocol as each publishing round completes, so a new listing is announced within minutes rather than waiting for a crawl. The workflow ends with a verification pass: every new page is requested over HTTP and confirmed to return a direct 200, every image in the set is confirmed to resolve, and the metadata on each new page is spot-checked for title, keywords, description and canonical link.
Why it matters for buyers
The practical effect is that a buyer searching for a specification, a grade, a certification question or a sourcing region, finds the relevant page on the first attempt rather than the third. The category expansion programme and the editorial programme both depend on this: pages that are not indexed do not answer questions, and pages that resolve through a redirect waste the crawl budget that finds them.
Related reading
The three products per leaf milestone note covers the content programme the infrastructure supports, and the multi-angle image rollout note covers the listing-side upgrade from the same week.
