SOP: Product sitemap for e-commerce

SOP: Product sitemap for e-commerce
Out-of-stock and variant chaos kills product indexing. Lock these rules.

Step 1 — Include ✅ only canonical product URLs (the variant Google should rank), never every color/size permutation.

Step 2 — In-stock vs discontinued:
— ✅ Active + buyable products → in sitemap
— Permanently discontinued → remove, 301 to category
— Temporarily OOS → keep in sitemap (still a valid page)

Step 3 — Exclude faceted/filter URLs (?color=, ?sort=). ✅ Zero parameter URLs in the file.

Step 4 — Set lastmod on real changes: price, availability, description — not stock count ticks.

Step 5 — Shard products into 50k-URL files under one index.

Definition of done: file contains only canonical, 200, buyable-or-temporarily-OOS product URLs, zero faceted parameters, sharded under 50k each.