Wordpress Subdomains and Google Sitemaps

Thanks to a post from Arnee over on the wordpress forums it seems you can now have one sitemap to cover multiple sites. This makes using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin work properly with Wordpress Subdomains.

Here’s the steps I took.

1. Install and configure the Google XML Sitemaps plugin
2. Login to the Google Webmaster Tools site
3. Add your main blog site
4. Choose to verify using the “Upload an HTML file”
5. Upload the file google give you to your document root
6. Click “Verify”
7. Add all your subdomains using the same method, it uses the same html file so there is no need to upload anything just click “Verify” each time
8. Go back into your main blog site configuration and pick Sitemaps
9. Click “Submit a Sitemap” and give it the address of the file created by the plugin
10. Google should now index all the urls in the sitemap

Hope this helps.

Thoughts on SEO

After having to fix a bug in the Wordpress Subdomains plugin so that All in One SEO would work, I decided it would be a good time to install it on my live site and see if there are any other issues I could see. So far it’s been pretty good, but it did raise some further questions about how SEO compatible the plugin is. This is where I need input from other people because I’m no expert on this.

First up is a feature I added last release (0.6.0). It basically kept links to normal Wordpress Pages on the Category or Author Subdomain being browsed. I did this mainly so that the person viewing one of your subdomains doesn’t get thrown back to the main site when they choose one of these pages. I did wonder if this would be seen as duplicate content by search engines and therefore be bad for SEO. Adam Dempsey felt the same, so I posted details of how to turn it off. I’ve made it optional in the next version (0.6.1 – in testing now) where it’s default state is off.

Maybe one solution to this would be to have these pages be set to ‘noindex’ when viewed on a subdomain so that search engines leave them be. I’ve not had a chance to look into how I’d do this yet.

Next up is how to deal with the root page of Category Subdomains. One of the options of the All in One SEO plugin is to set noindex on Categories Archives. This is to combat the problem of duplicate content, however when you turn this on it means that the root page of a Category Subdomain will be marked noindex and wont appear on search engine searches. This should not affect your content as it should all be linked from your main site which will still be indexed. That is except for Pages that you have tied to specific categories.

For this reason the next version will include a new custom field for pages that will have links for them appearing in page lists (widgets, etc) on your main site. I’ve done this with my Projects page which is tied to the Web Development subdomain, but I wanted it to be linked from main page as the Web Development subdomain main page is not indexed.

The question is, is this the best way to do this from an SEO point of view and what if you want your subdomain root pages to appear on the search engine?

I’d also be interested to know people opinions on the how the plugin handles SEO in other ways. What does it do wrong? What could be improved?

I look forward to hearing from you.

WP Subdomains 0.6.1 is in testing on this site and will be released soon.

And now the 0.6.0 bugs :(

So far I just spotted one bug. If you’re using the Date Archive filtering and you are on a Subdmain Category it may get the wrong count for the month. This happens if a post is linked to more than one category in that subdomain’s heirarchy (i.e that category and any of it’s children).

Apart from that, Adam Dempsey (one of the previous authors of this plugin) confirmed something that I suspected. The feature I added to keep links to pages on the subdomain you’re viewing could be bad in terms of SEO. I’ve decided I will release an update in the next few days to make this a configurable option. However if you want rid of it now then:

1. Open plugin/filters.php
2. Go to the function named wps_page_link( $link, $id )
3. Look for the line $link = $wps_this_subdomain->changePostLink( $link );
4. Remove or comment it out
5. Save the file

That’s all for now. Anyone else spots anything then let me know.