Sitemap for multilingual website

SEO
1

Dear community,
I have a big issue on my website that is still not indexed by google due to problem on sitemaps and duplicated content…

Okay I have a website in 2 languages, so I have created 2 directories into “Markets” as it seems to be the best practice “fr-ch” and “en-ch”. The 1st consequence is great as I have hreflang automatically generated. But the big problem I encounter is the 4 product sitemaps generated by Shopify (actually the issue exists. for products / pages / blogs / collections)

  • 1 in French without “fr-ch” in the URL => all content is 302 redirected to the /en/ equivalent

  • 1 in English without “en-ch” in the URL, just “/en/” => all content is 302 redirected to the /en-ch/ equivalent

  • 1 in French with “fr-ch” in the URL => 200, no redirection

  • 1 in English with “en-ch” in the URL => 200, no redirection

Capture d’écran 2025-09-21 à 15.22.44
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Does anybody knows how can I tell Shopify to JUST create the sitemap for “fr-ch”, “en-ch” as per the definition in “Markets” ? Meaning the 1st 2 blocks should not be generated.

Thanks a lot for your help !

Sylvain

2

Here the subfolders in Markets

Capture d’écran 2025-09-21 à 15.31.44
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3

If it’s the same country, why do you have 2 markets?
2 languages would be enough…
Do not specifically assign them to markets anyway.

This way you’d only have store.com/ for default language and store.com/en for a second language (if english is the second).

4

Thanks a lot @tim_1. I actually have juste 1 market, but 2 languages. The screenshot shows them from “Domain / language” of this Market. Maybe yes I did it wrong, so you would recommend to simply delete those directories and keep as you suggest /en and the other primary language?

5

In my test store I have 2 languages and a bunch of markets.
None of the markets have languages specifically assigned.

In my sitemap I have only *.myshopify.com links for default English and a *.myshopify.com/LL/ for my alternate language.
https://bbkmarket.myshopify.com/sitemap.xml

However, as soon as I specifically assign, say English on US market, it will come with /en-us/ links in addition…

If your store is live, I would not play much with those as Google may crawl wrong URLs you will have hard time getting rid of.

If needed, I can create a development store for you to play and them use the same config on your live one.

6

Website is live since 1 month but total mess as I didn’t see the sitemaps, and so the URL mess it created.. I anyway need to do something. I will keep the /en and potentially others /LL as the locals, keeping just the correct sitemaps. /en-us/ or /fr-ch/ or any other are always best for SEO but apparently not really working on Spotify..