So a client asked about how to get found on Google. Patience is always a good thing with the internet because most of it is cached on numerous servers in order to produce a better response time (in english: replicated to more places for better availability, think a kiosk), which in turn means that it takes a bit of time for changes to propagate to all the servers (in english: keeping multiple servers up to date, while keeping up with the huge internet takes time to do properly). It also takes time for search engines to find your site in the first place.
However a good way to get eg. Google to know you is to send them a sitemap; these hold information about what your site contains, and how often it is updated and thus how often they should be visited by a search engine robot (to update their information on your site) – this is Gold for search engines. My client uses JigoShop, and after searching the web I found this blog entry, http://www.businesslegions.com/blog/2012/05/29/rss-product-feed-for-jigoshop-wordpress/ saying that it’s possible to get a feed with your JigoShop products by using the following url:
http://your.url/feed/?post_type=product
However that didn’t work, he didn’t have a “feed” folder, so back to Google for some WordPress syntax! http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds explained that the /feed/ url could be used if you’d started using custom permalinks on your site, however I hadn’t set my client’s up to any of that, to which it also explained that the standard url was available:
http://example.com/?feed=rss2
I still had to scope the feed in order to get the JigoShop products though, but an example further down easily showed how to do this: (quoting directly from the page)
You can also provide feeds to only specific categories or tags on your site by adding the following to the end of the link:
http://www.example.com/?cat=42&feed=rss2
(not quoting directly from the page anymore)
Which meant that the final url I should be using for his site “might be”
http://www.example.com/?feed=rss2&post_type=product
I tested it and it worked. Awesome.
Explanation of the code.
I want an rss2 feed, therefore I use the code
http://www.example.com/?feed=rss2
And I only want the JigoShop products, so I specify it with,
post_type=product
the questionmark (?) is used in the url to denote the beginning of arguments to the website, the ampersand (&) is used in the url as a separator between arguments, and the order of the arguments play no role. Meaning that the url could just as well be:
http://www.example.com/?post_type=product&feed=rss2
This is standard “html form/get knowledge”.