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
-
Essential to Have a Blog to Rank Well?
I have noticed that several competitors that rank very well rarely update their blogs, www.42floors.com for instance. We are redesigning our commercial real estate Wordpress website in the hopes of improving traffic, ranking and conversions. How critical is it to invest resources on creating and categorizing blog posts? Is frequently updating a blog post less necessary in late 2018? Curious to hear how much effort we should take to create new blog content and whether or not it will assist us in a competitive niche. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan12 -
What would the Impact of having a sitemap be?
Hi, some more general question here: How important would you rate it to have a sitemap? Would you rate it fundamentally important or just something you can add as bonus? Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brainfruit0 -
Ranking with subdomain - Urgent
Does anyone have any experience if it is possible to get a website ranking on a subdomain? I'm trying out a business idea and need to keep costs to an absolute minimum. I have a site which I designed in wix.com they give a free subdomain and I want to know if there's any chance of getting it to rank Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Robots.txt Blocking - Best Practices
Hi All, We have a web provider who's not willing to remove the wildcard line of code blocking all agents from crawling our client's site (user-agent: *, Disallow: /). They have other lines allowing certain bots to crawl the site but we're wondering if they're missing out on organic traffic by having this main blocking line. It's also a pain because we're unable to set up Moz Pro, potentially because of this first line. We've researched and haven't found a ton of best practices regarding blocking all bots, then allowing certain ones. What do you think is a best practice for these files? Thanks! User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: Crawl-delay: 5 User-agent: Yahoo-slurp Disallow: User-agent: bingbot Disallow: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /new_vehicle_detail.asp Disallow: /new_vehicle_compare.asp Disallow: /news_article.asp Disallow: /new_model_detail_print.asp Disallow: /used_bikes/ Disallow: /default.asp?page=xCompareModels Disallow: /fiche_section_detail.asp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReunionMarketing0 -
Robots.txt
Hi all, Happy New Year! I want to block certain pages on our site as they are being flagged (according to my Moz Crawl Report) as duplicate content when in fact that isn't strictly true, it is more to do with the problems faced when using a CMS system... Here are some examples of the pages I want to block and underneath will be what I believe to be the correct robots.txt entry... http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=viewNewContent&search_app=members&search_app_filters[forums][searchInKey]=&period=today&userMode=&followedItemsOnly= Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=core&module=search http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=reports&rcom=gallery&imageId=980&ctyp=image Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=core&module=reports http://www.XYZ.com/forum/index.php?app=forums&module=post§ion=post&do=reply_post&f=146&t=741&qpid=13308 Disallow: /forum/index.php?app=forums&module=post http://www.XYZ.com/forum/gallery/sizes/182-promenade/small/ http://www.XYZ.com/forum/gallery/sizes/182-promenade/large/ Disallow: /forum/gallery/sizes/ Any help \ advice would be much appreciated. Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Blog Integration
I have a blog and website, .. I have it under the same domain but it has its own login and dashboard ect..I would like to fully integrate it to my website so it becomes a part of my main navigation... If anyone know's how to do this or even has an idea on where to start it is greatly appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach0 -
302 redirects in the sitemap?
My website uses a prefix at the end to instruct the back-end about visitor details. The setup is similar to this site - http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=sf with a 302 redirect from the normal link to the one with additional info and a canonical tag on the actual URL without the extra info ((the normal one here being http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com,) However, when I used www.xml-sitemaps.com to create a sitemap they did so using the URLs with the extra info on the links... what should I do to create a sitemap using the normal URLs (which are the ones I want to be promoting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Export Website into XML File
Hi, I am having an agency optimize the content on my sites. I need to create XML Schema before I export the content into XML. What is best way to export content including meta tags for an entire site along with the steps on how to?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0