Wordpress Blog Integrated into eCommerce site - Should we use one xml sitemap or two?
-
Hi guys,
I wonder whether you can help me with a couple of SEO queries:
So we have an ecommerce website (www.exampleecommercesite.com) with its own xml sitemap, which we have submitted to the Google Webmasters Console. However, recently we decided to add a blog to our site for SEO purposes.
The blog is on a subdomain of the site such as:
(We wanted to have it as www.exampleecommercesite.com/blog but our server made it very difficult and it wasn't technically possible at the time)
1. Should we add the blog.exampleecommercesite.com as a separate property in the Google Webmaster tools?
2. Should we create a separate xml sitemap for the blog content or are there more benefits in terms of SEO if we have one sitemap for the blog and the ecommerce site?
If appreciate your opinions on the topic!
Thank you and have a good start of the week!
-
Glad to help!
-
Thanks Logan! This makes perfect sense but we just wanted to be 100% sure.
-
Since your blog is on a subdomain, yes, you will need to set up a separate WMT profile for it. The blog will also need its own robots.txt and XML sitemap files, since technically speaking, subdomains are regarded as a different site.
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
-
What tools and metrics do you use to show a topic's search interest over time?
I have a foundation repair client that is down in leads for the structural repair portion of their business. They have not lost any major rankings, but leads are down compared to last year. They asked if people are searching for this type of work less this year compared to last. I checked Google Trends and Keyword Planner data but found very different results. Is either of these tools accurate, or is there a better tool to use?
Algorithm Updates | | DigitalDivision1 -
By Using interstitial (popups) on the webiste, will google penalize ranks for desktop and mobile both ?
We have implemented interstitials (pop-ups) on a website (Business Articles Website). The popups are basically used for getting leads from the website (using Signup popups). Before Popup implementation the traffic was steady, After the implementation, the traffic started to decay after a couple of weeks and due to the drop we disabled the popup from the website and initiated a force crawl and within next few weeks, we observed traffic gaining back to its normal trend. Within these timelines drop in desktop traffic was more and mobile traffic remain steady. As per Google guidelines, interstitials are more likely to be affected on mobile than desktop. But in our case, desktop traffic was hit more than mobile. So we carried out this experiment for 3 months. And we observed traffic decay and regain. Is interstitials the only culprit here (as the drop is only in desktop) or Can there be some other reasons as well for the traffic drop? bF7hc
Algorithm Updates | | iQuanti1 -
Which is the best way - to have all FAQ pages at one place, or splitted in different sections of the website?
Hi all, We have a lot of FAQ sections on our website, splitted in different places, depending on products, technologies, etc. If we want to optimize our content for Google's Featured Snippets, Voice Search and etc. - what is the best option: to combine them all in one FAQ section? or it doesn't matter for Google that this type of content is not in one place? Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | lgrozeva0 -
Google & Site Architecture
Hi I've been reading the following article about Google's quality signals here: https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/10/10/guide-to-google-ranking-signals-part-6-trust-authority-and-expertise/?utm_source=Search+Engine+Watch&utm_campaign=464594db7c-11_10_2016_NL&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e118661359-464594db7c-17828341 They mention - 3) All your categories should be accessible from the main menu. All your web pages should be labelled with the relevant categories. Is this every category? We have some say 3 levels deep, and they aren't all in the menu. I'd like them to be, so would be good to make a case for it. Thank you
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey1 -
Ecommerce sites 30% drop in organic since the spring
I help manage SEO for a number of large retail websites and we've seen a significant drop in organic traffic (upwards of 30%) since around May 2015. It's likely we were hit my Google's Phantom Quality update, but I don't understand why it had such a big impact. Can anyone explain that Google update in more depth and advise on steps to take to recover from it? Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | JimLynch0 -
Duplicate Product Pages On Niche Site
I have a main site, and a niche site that has products for a particular category. For example, Clothing.com is the main site, formalclothing.com is the niche site. The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated). I have been considering shutting down the niche site, and doing a 301 to the category of the main site. Here are some more details: The niche sites ranks fairly well on Yahoo and Bing. Much better than the main site for keywords relevant to that category. The niche site was hit with Penguin, but doesn't seem to have been effected much by Panda. When I analyze a product page on the main site using copyscape, 1-2 pages of the niche site do show, but NOT that exact product page on the niche site. Questions: Given the information above, how can I gauge the impact the duplicate content is having if any? Is it a bad idea to do a canonical tag on the product pages of the niche site, citing the main site as the original source? Any other considerations aside from duplicate content or Penguin issue when deciding to 301? Would you 301 if this was your site? Thanks in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | inhouseseo0 -
Large site with faceted navigation using rel=canonical, but Google still has issues
First off, I just wanted to mention I did post this on one other forum so I hope that is not completely against the rules here or anything. Just trying to get an idea from some of the pros at both sources. Hope this is received well. Now for the question..... "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site:" Gotta love these messages in GWT. Anyway, I wanted to get some other opinions here so if anyone has experienced something similar or has any recommendations I would love to hear them. First off, the site is very large and utilizes faceted navigation to help visitors sift through results. I have implemented rel=canonical for many months now to have each page url that is created based on the faceted nav filters, push back to the main category page. However, I still get these damn messages from Google every month or so saying that they found too many pages on the site. My main concern obviously is wasting crawler time on all these pages that I am trying to do what they ask in these instances and tell them to ignore and find the content on page x. So at this point I am thinking about possibly using robots.txt file to handle these, but wanted to see what others around here thought before I dive into this arduous task. Plus I am a little ticked off that Google is not following a standard they helped bring to the table. Thanks for those who take the time to respond in advance.
Algorithm Updates | | PeteGregory0 -
What do i need to do to drive more traffic to my site
Hi i built a site around ten months ago but at the moment i am only receiving around 3 visitors a a day. it is a travel site that i write new content for but because i am still learning seo i am not sure what i have been doing wrong. I am not sure of the basics from getting people to the site or the correct way of generating free links or if i should be submitting my site to all these free site submitters which includes to lycos and other free services that you can find on google. If anyone can please explain what i am doing wrong and how to generate more traffic for free then that would be great. also can anyone recommend any free service that would help with increasing traffic and links
Algorithm Updates | | ClaireH-1848860