Sitemaps and subdomains
-
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
-
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
-
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.
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
-
Process to move blog from subdomain on Wordpress, to subfolder on BigCommerce store
Hi Having weighed up all the angles, it's time to bite the bullet and move our blog from a subdomain to a subfolder on our ecommerce store. But as someone new to SEO I am struggling to find the correct process for doing this properly for our situation. Can anyone help? I have outlined what I have learned so far in 10 steps below to hopefully help you understand my situation, where I am at and what I am struggling with. Advice, tips and suggested further reading on all/any of the 10 points would be great. Some quick background The blog is on Wordpress, and on a subdomain of our store (blog.store.com). It is four years old, with 80 original posts we want to move to a subfolder of the store (store.com/blog). The store has been built using BigCommerce, and has also been active for four years. Both the blog and the store exist as properties within our Google Search Console. The 10 steps required for the move, based on research so far, and the associated questions 1 Prepare new site: which I am guessing means reproducing all of the content over at the new subfolder location (store.com/blog)? 2 Setup errors for any pages not being transferred: I have no idea how to do this! 3 Make sure analytics is working for the new pages: it should be as the both the site the pages are moving to a subfolder of is already running with analytics and has been for years - is this a safe assumption? 4 Map all URLs being moved to their new counterparts: is this just record keeping? In a spreadsheet? Or is it a process I don't yet understand?? 5 Add rel='cannonical' tags: while I understand the concept of these, I have no idea how to implement them properly here! 6 Create and save new sitemaps: as both the blog.store.com and store.com exist in Google Search Console already, can I just refresh the sitemap for store.com/blog once the subfolder is created to achive this? 7 Setup and test 301 redirects: these can be created in BigCommerce for the new pages in the store.com/blog subfolder, and will refer back to the blog.store.com URLs the pages came from - is this the right way to do this? I am still learning here and know enough to know how much this can matter, but not enough to fully grasp the intricacies of the process 8 Move URLs simultaneously: I have no idea what this means or how to achieve it! is this just for big site moves? Does it still apply to 80 blog posts shifting from a subdomain to a subfolder on the same root? If so, how? 9 Submit a change of address in Google Search Console: This looks simple enough although Google ominously warn: ‘Don't use this tool unless you are moving your primary website presence to a new address’ Which makes me wonder how simple it really is - my primary website in this case is the store, which is not moving. address But does 'primary' here simply mean the individual property with search console? I am going in circles on this one! 10 Configure the old blog on the subdomain to redirect people and engines to the new pages: I thought the 301 redirects and rel='cannonical' stuff did that already? What did I miss?? For anyone still here, thanks for making it this far and if you still have the energy left, any advice would be great! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Warren_331 -
How do I fix my sitemap?
I have no idea how this happened, but our sitemap was http://www.kempruge.com/sitemap.xml, now it's http://www.kempruge.com/category/news/feed/ and google won't index it. It 404's. Obviously, I had to have done something wrong, but I don't know what and more importantly, I don't know how to find it in the backend of wordpress to change it. I tried a 301 redirect, but GWT still 404'd it. Any ideas? And, it's been like this for a few weeks, I've just neglected it, so I can't just reset the site without losing a lot of work. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Sitemaps on the fly
Has anyone submitted pages that generate sitemaps on the fly as opposed to only submitting static XML files to Bing? For instance, sitemap.php vs sitemap.xml, video sitemap.php vs videositemap.xml?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan0 -
If I only Link to Page via Sitemap, can it still get indexed?
Hi there! I am creating a ton of content for specific geographies. Is it possible for these pages to get indexed if I only put them in my sitemap and don't link to them through my actual site (though the pages will be live). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Travis0 -
Is Sitemap Issue Causing Duplicate Content & Unindexed Pages on Google?
On July 10th my site was migrated from Drupal to Google. The site contains approximately 400 pages. 301 permanent redirects were used. The site contains maybe 50 pages of new content. Many of the new pages have not been indexed and many pages show as duplicate content. Is it possible that there is a site map issue that is causing this problem? My developer believes the map is formatted correctly, but I am not convinced. The sitemap address is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/page-sitemap.xml [^] I am completely non technical so if anyone could take a brief look I would appreciate it immensely. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan | |0 -
Links from a website or a subdomain, which would generate more benefits in terms of SEO?
I have a customer who just bought a domain (and the full website) of a competitor and decided that they will no longer update the website purchased. The website of my client has a Domain Authority = 50 and DA of the website purchased is 45. Each of them was registered by different companies and are on different servers too.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marciofelias
The reason for my message is that by being registered by different companies and are in differrent servers I can use the site purchased as a way to make link building to the main website (one way link buiding only from the website purchased to the main website), but I can put the website purchased as a subdomain of the main website and agregate content to the main website.
In your opinion which would generate more benefits in terms of SEO to the main website? Links from the website purchased or put this website as a subdomain to the main website?0 -
Is there a way to keep sitemap.xml files from getting indexed?
Wow, I should know the answer to this question. Sitemap.xml files have to be accessible to the bots for indexing they can't be disallowed in robots.txt and can't block the folder at the server level. So how can you allow the bots to crawl these xml pages but have them not show up in google's index when doing a site: command search, or is that even possible? Hmmm
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
XML Sitemap instruction in robots.txt = Worth doing?
Hi fellow SEO's, Just a quick one, I was reading a few guides on Bing Webmaster tools and found that you can use the robots.txt file to point crawlers/bots to your XML sitemap (they don't look for it by default). I was just wondering if it would be worth creating a robots.txt file purely for the purpose of pointing bots to the XML sitemap? I've submitted it manually to Google and Bing webmaster tools but I was thinking more for the other bots (I.e. Mozbot, the SEOmoz bot?). Any thoughts would be appreciated! 🙂 Regards, Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshSEO20110