Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it bad to host an XML sitemap in a different subdomain?
-
Example: sitemap.example.com/sitemap.xml for pages on www.example.com.
-
It's still linked, so Google will still read it. I just honestly don't know how Google will interpret it.
Is this something that's in place? What is webmaster tools showing?
-
Thanks Paul, what if there are limitations to posting the sitemap to another subdomain? Can Google connect the dots if sitemap.example.com is verified in your webmaster tools account and www.example.com/robots.txt points to the sitemap in the other subdomain?
-
Google treats sub domains, almost as different domains.
I would keep sitemaps relative to their own subdomain.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 20, 2019, 7:32 AM | oceanstorm0 -
Pending Sitemaps
Hi, all Wondering if someone could give me a pointer or two, please. I cannot seem to get Google or Bing to crawl my sitemap. If I submit the sitemap in WMT and test it I get a report saying 44,322urls found. However, if I then submit that same sitemap it either says Pending (in old WMT) or Couldn't fetch in the new version. This couldn't fetch is very puzzling as it had no issue fetching the map to test it. My other domains on the same server are fine, the problem is limited to this one site. I have tried several pages on the site using the Fetch as Google tool and they load without issue, however, try as I may, it will not fetch my sitemap. The sitemapindex.xml file won't even submit. I can confirm my sitemaps, although large, work fine, please see the following as an example (minus the spaces, of course, didn't want to submit and make it look like I was just trying to get a link) https:// digitalcatwalk .co.uk/sitemap.xml https:// digitalcatwalk .co.uk/sitemapindex.xml I would welcome any feedback anyone could offer on this, please. It's driving me mad trying to work out what is up. Many thanks, Jeff
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 1, 2019, 8:55 AM | wonkydogadmin0 -
Priority Attribute in XML Sitemaps - Still Valid?
Is the priority value (scale of 0-1) used for each URL in an XML sitemap still a valid way of communicating to search engines which content you (the webmaster) believe is more important relative to other content on your site? I recall hearing that this was no longer used, but can't find a source. If it is no longer used, what are the easiest ways to communicate our preferences to search engines? Specifically, I'm looking to preference the most version version of a product's documentation (version 9) over the previous version (version 8). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Dec 3, 2015, 1:52 AM | Allie_Williams0 -
Blog subdomain not redirecting
Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week. And then there's this weeks report. For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared. I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared. FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect. I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 13, 2015, 2:36 PM | MarkWill0 -
What are partial urls and why this is causing a sitemap error?
Hi mozzers, I have a client that recorded 7 errors when generating Xml sitemap. One of the errors appear to be coming from partial urls and apparently I would need to exclude them from sitemap. What are they exactly and why would they cause an error in the sitemap. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 6, 2014, 10:00 PM | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 10, 2014, 2:43 AM | SMG-Texas0 -
Subdomain Blog Sitemap link - Add it to regular domain?
Example of setup:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 14, 2013, 3:21 PM | EEE3
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com). I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap. 1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol? 2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer. 3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap. Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done. Thanks!0 -
Franchise sites on subdomains
I've been asked by a client to optimise a a webpage for a location i.e. London. Turns out that the location is actually a franchise of the main company. When the company launch a new franchise, so far they have simply added a new page to the main site, for example: mysite.co.uk/sub-folder/london They have so far done this for 10 or so franchises and task someone with optimising that page for their main keyword + location. I think I know the answer to this, but would like to get a back up / additional info on it in terms of ranking / seo benefits. I am going to suggest the idea of using a subdomain for each location, example: london.mysite.co.uk Would this be the correct approach. If you think yes, why? Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 5, 2012, 3:11 PM | Webrevolve0