Sitemaps and subdomains
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At the beginning of our life-cycle, we were just a wordpress blog. However, we just launched a product created in Ruby. Because we did not have time to put together an open source Ruby CMS platform, we left the blog in wordpress and app in rails.
Thus our web app is at http://www.thesquarefoot.com and our blog is at http://blog.thesquarefoot.com. We did re-directs such that if the URL does not exist at www.thesquarefoot.com it automatically forwards to blog.thesquarefoot.com.
What is the best way to handle sitemaps? Create one for blog.thesquarefoot.com and for http://www.thesquarefoot.com and submit them separately?
We had landing pages like http://www.thesquarefoot.com/houston in wordpress, which ranked well for Find Houston commercial real estate, which have been replaced with a landing page in Ruby, so that URL works well. The url that was ranking well for this word is now at blog.thesquarefoot.com/houston/? Should i delete this page? I am worried if i do, we will lose ranking, since that was the actual page ranking, not the new one.
Until we are able to create an open source Ruby CMS and move everything over to a sub-directory and have everything live in one place, I would love any advice on how to mitigate damage and not confuse Google.
Thanks
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We just submitted a new sitemap to google for our new rails app -
http://www.thesquarefoot.com/sitemap.xml
Which has over 1,400 pages, however Google is only seeing 114. About 1,200 are in the listings folder / 250 blog posts / and 15 landing pages.
Any help would be appreciated!
Aron
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For sitemaps I'd try creating a single sitemap on thesquarefoot.com which includes the blog.subdomain.
You'll need to make sure that the subdomain is verified in GWMT and you'll also want to include the sitemap inthe robots.txt for both subdomain and root domain.
With regard to your landing pages I would 301 redirect the old landing page to the new one rather than deleting it.
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