3 replies to this topic

[Jadee77]

Hi, we had to create our blog on another server because IT said it was going to be too complicated with their current technology and to update sitemaps on a regular basis etc. So right now we have the domain with the main site and then 'blog.domain.com' which is hosted on a different server. I have created the blog to look exactly like their main site and they both have the same navigation so it looks like it's all one site. Since their DNN site won't let us add pages to the main sitemap easily, I have installed a separate sitemap plugin on the blog site which updates each time we post and will let us submit the updated sitemap to Google. Since I can't submit the subdomain in webmasters as part of the site, I was going to submit the 'blog.domain.com' as a separate site to our webmasters account in the hopes that will help indexing etc. Is there any danger to the main domain if I do this? On webmasters i did some research and it looked like several others had done the same, but one person did say that they believe it caused their main domain to drop in rank.

I would appreciate any insight some of you might have before I try this.

Thanks in advance.

[qwerty]

Adding the subdomain as a separate site in Webmaster Tools will only mean the reports you get there will treat it as a separate site. We do that all the time where I work. Our sites are broken down into subdomains, and we set up each subdomain with its own Webmaster Tools listing. It actually makes tracking things much easier. A given subdomain serves a different purpose from another, and is optimized for different keywords. It may even have a completely different audience in some cases.

Doing this will have no effect on how Google treats the subdomain in reference to rankings, or whether a query that returns the main site will also return pages from the subdomain, no matter what server it's on. That's something I still see people debating, but not in reference to Webmaster Tools.

[Michael Martinez]

I track a few sub-domains separately in Webmaster Tools. Doing so has never led to any negative impact in my search performance for other parts of a domain. Whatever someone saw that led them to believe that may have happened to them, they were misinterpreting the data and inferring cause-and-effect without really knowing what happened.

[Jadee77]

Sorry I didn't see that you had responded. I have it set up to notify me but for some reason it doesn't work on this forum.

Thanks so much for the feedback and notes on your own experience with it. I had heard one horror story so I just wanted to check into it more before I moved forward.

Thanks again.