Looking for re-assurance on this one: Sitemap approach for multi-subdomains
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Hi All:
Just looking for a bit of "yeah it'll be fine" reassurance on this before we go ahead and implement:
We've got a main accommodation listing website under www.* and a separate travel content site using a completely different platform on blog.* (same domain - diffn't sub-domain). We pull in snippets of content from blog.* > www.* using a feed and we have cross-links going both ways, e.g. links to find accommodation in blog articles and links to blog articles from accommodation listings.
Look-and-feel wise they're fully integrated. The blog.* site is a tab under the main nav.
What i'd like to do is get Google (and others) to view this whole thing as one site - and attribute any SEO benefit of content on blog.* pages to the www.* domain. Make sense?
So, done a bit of reading - and here's what i've come up with:
- Seperate sitemaps for each, both located in the root of www site
- robots.txt in root of www site to have single sitemap entry:
sitemap : www.example.com/sitemap-www
- robots.txt in root of blog site to have single sitemap entry:
sitemap: www.example.com/sitemap-blog
- Submit both sitemaps to Webmaster tools.
Does this sound reasonable? Any better approaches? Anything I'm missing?
All input appreciated!
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Thanks Ben. We'll look to do this in the future.
Maybe with a virtual directory or something.
Cheers!
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If you are looking for Google to view the site as a whole I would consider moving the subdomain to a subfolder. Especially if the subdomain is integrated into the navigation it makes sense to merge them.
I don't think a sitemap is going to have too much of an effect on the way Google handles the subdomain.
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