Multistore Sitemap

[moon-boots]

I use Magento 2 Multistore and have 2 stores set up with identical products, one for the EU and one for the US. The best practice is to allow Google to crawl both sites, but what about the sitemap?

Should I only include one store? The reason I ask is that Google has recently started ignoring canonicalized URLs, so even though the second store is canonicalized, it could affect my rank.

My rank did drop with the last update when this was rolled out, I stopped some canonicalized URLs from generating and my rank went back up (albeit not as high as before).

[WebQuest]

I would recommend having 2 sitemaps - one for the US store and the other for the EU store. However, technically one sitemap will be fine. The reason I would recommend 2 different ones is for you to be able to see how many URLs from each sitemap are being indexed vs how many are being ignored - this will allow you to further investigate any possible issues.

That being said, it sounds like you have a different issue since Google is choosing different canonicals than the ones you are declaring. This would probably be because the US and EU pages are almost identical and Google doesn't see a need to index both. Have you implemented HREFLANG across your website to target the different regions?  I would also look into the on-page elements & content for each page to make them more relevant to their targeted regions. Things like Titles, Headers, descriptive text, etc should be different in both sets of pages depending on the target region of each page.

Hope that helps.