How to handle a blog subdomain on the main sitemap and robots file?
-
Hi,
I have some confusion about how our blog subdomain is handled in our sitemap. We have our main website, example.com, and our blog, blog.example.com.
-
Should we list the blog subdomain URL in our main sitemap? In other words, is listing a subdomain allowed in the root sitemap?
-
What does the final structure look like in terms of the sitemap and robots file? Specifically:
would I include a link to our blog subdomain (blog.example.com)?
would I include a link to BOTH our main sitemap and blog sitemap?
would I include a link to our main website URL (even though it's not a subdomain)?
does a subdomain need its own robots file?
I'm a technical SEO and understand the mechanics of much of on-page SEO.... but for some reason I never found an answer to this specific question and I am wondering how the pros do it. I appreciate your help with this.
-
-
It's my understanding that you treat each subdomain as a unique site. So each subdomain should have its own unique XML sitemap and robots.txt file, as well as submitted separately to Google Webmaster Tools. But to answer your inter-linking question, I would avoid including the other domain URLs in those files (XML and Robots). Only include the URLs for that particular domain and/or subdomain. With that being said however, I would inter-link them on the actual site somewhere. Maybe in the HTML sitemap, navigation, footer, or even naturally throughout your body content where appropriate as well.
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
-
Set Robots.txt file to crawl my website at specific times
Our website provider has stated that they can only 'lift' their block on our website in order for it to be crawled as specific times. Is there any way to amend a robots.txt to ensure that it crawls our website at a specific time of day/night in order to coincide with the block being lifted? Many Thanks, Charlene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CharleneKennedy120 -
Is it worth creating an Image Sitemap?
We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site. The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason. From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHolgate
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?1 -
Disavow File Submission process?
Hi Mozzers, I am working for client that hasn't got penalized but has lots of junk seo directories that I would like to disavow. My question is should i try reaching out to webmasters (if they are existant) first and show proof to google? or should I just go ahead and submit the file without any reach out?will it still work? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Does a sitemap override Google parameter handling?
This question might seem silly, but I'll ask anyway. We have an eCommerce site with a ton of duplicate content, mostly caused by faceted navigation. In researching ways to reduce the clutter, I've decided to use Google parameter handling to stop Googlebot from crawling pages with certain parameters, like: sort order, page #, etc... Now my question: If I set all of these parameters so that Googlebot doesn't crawl the grids, how will they ever find the individual product pages? We do upload a sitemap with all of the product pages. Does this solve my issue? Or, should I handle the duplicate content with noindex, follow tag? Or, is there an even better way? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
Page Titles of Blog
Hi, Should all the page titles of our blogs include a Keyword(s) and\or our website name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Disallow my store in robots.txt?
Should I disallow my store directory in robots.txt? Here is the URL: https://www.stdtime.com/store/ Here are my reasons for suggesting this: SEOMOZ finds crawl "errors" in there that I don't care about I don't think I care if the search engines index those pages I only have one product, and it is not an impulse buy My product has a 60 day sales cycle, so price is less important than features
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raywhite0 -
Sitemap not indexing pages
My website has about 5000 pages submitted in the sitemap but only 900 being indexed. When I checked Google Webmaster Tools about a week ago 4500 pages were being indexed. Any suggestions about what happened or how to fix it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
What To Do For A Website That is Mainly Images
I have a website that is a desktop wallpaper script. People can come and upload 100's of wallpapers to share with the community. This is were the problems comes in. Files are normally called 27636dark.jpg or whatever and come with no description. This leads to 2 things. no text content that google can use to know what the page/image is about. Meta descriptions, URL's just look like spam. Example: /car-wallpapers/7636dark.jpg If a text description was added, it would still only be like "Green Trees in the distance". Which as you may guess, with 1,000's of wallpapers... would end up having a lot of descriptions the same. Is there any advice for sites that focus on image driven content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster0