Smart SEO Mode
Smart SEO Mode uses a logarithmic formula based on actual sales data to make your sitemap tell search engines which products matter most — instead of assigning the same priority to everything.
How the Priority Formula Works
The formula calculates an importance score between 0.7 and 1.0 for each product:
| Sales Volume | Score |
|---|---|
| Zero sales (new product) | 0.7 — never penalised for being new |
| ~1% of store’s max sales | ~0.8 |
| ~10% of store’s max sales | ~0.9 |
| Top seller (100% of max) | 1.0 |
The formula uses a logarithmic scale, so the difference between 1 and 10 sales matters more than the difference between 100 and 110. This ensures both new products and mid-tier products get fair representation.
This same score is used as:
- The
<priority>value in your XML sitemap - The
importance_scorefield in the AI JSON feed
Both outputs always agree on product importance.
When to Enable Smart SEO Mode
- Enable once you have at least a few months of sales data
- Especially valuable for stores with 50+ products where crawl budget matters
- Works best combined with the File Cache (cache stores the priority scores, avoiding recalculation on every request)
💡 Recommendation: Enable Smart SEO Mode for any store with more than 50 products. It ensures your best-performing products are crawled first, improving how quickly new bestsellers get indexed.
Static File Cache
Without a cache, every sitemap request regenerates the XML by querying the database. For stores with thousands of products, this is slow and resource-intensive. The file cache writes generated XML/JSON to disk and serves subsequent requests directly from disk — zero database queries on cache hits.
Sitemap Cache Settings
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Enable Static File Cache | Off | When enabled, sitemap XML files are stored in system/storage/cache/hbseo_sitemap/. Highly recommended for production. |
| Cache Lifetime (seconds) | 3600 | How long a cached file is considered fresh. 3600 = 1 hour. Increase to 86400 (24 hours) for stores with infrequent updates. Minimum: 60. |
AI Feed Cache Settings
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Enable AI Feed File Cache | Off | When enabled, AI JSON feed files are stored in system/storage/cache/hbseo_ai_feed/. Recommended when AI feed is enabled. |
| AI Feed Cache Lifetime (seconds) | 3600 | How long a cached AI feed JSON file is considered fresh. Minimum: 60. |
Cache Invalidation
The cache is automatically purged whenever you save settings. You can also manually purge at any time using:
- [Purge Sitemap Cache] — removes all cached sitemap XML files
- [Purge AI Feed Cache] — removes all cached AI feed JSON files
Both buttons display the number of files deleted.
HTTP Caching Headers
The cache system sends proper ETag, Last-Modified, and Cache-Control headers and supports 304 Not Modified responses. Well-behaved crawlers that send If-None-Match or If-Modified-Since headers receive a 304 response with no body — saving bandwidth on both sides.
Invalid Date Detection
Some OpenCart stores have product or category records with corrupt last-modified dates (e.g., 0000-00-00 00:00:00). These cause problems in XML sitemaps and can trigger Google Search Console warnings.
The extension detects these on the settings page and shows a warning. Use the Fix Incorrect Dates button in the Tools tab to automatically correct them.