Our SEO guru is on vacation and I've got just enough experience to be dangerous, so I really appreciate any and all ideas in advance... We have a client with 3 domains that all reference the same materials. My guess is soemthing is wong with indexing for a number of reasons- 1. site: is only returning pages for one of the domains...the one that was set up as the dominant domain 2. site: only returns a list of about 25% of the pages for that domain 3. Webmaster tools says there is no data available even for the one site that seems to be indexing to some degree 4. Indexs seem to have failed in webmaster tools for the other 2 domains Webtool work was done a month and a half ago, so it doesnt look like somethign that will work itself out over time. Here's my guess how to fix it and I may be entirely wrong: 1. Create an 'uber sitemap' - I don't remember what this is called, but it combines multiple sitemaps 2. Make an individual sitemap for each domain 3. List the individual sitemaps in the 'ubersitemap' 4. Go back to each domain in webtools and point each domain at the ubersitemap. Does this sound like I'm on the right track? Are there other issues I should be considering? Can anyone point me to a tutorial to make the ubersitemap if that's the way to go? Thanks again for any and all ideas!
Sounds like your "SEO GURU" should stay on vacation... Permanently. Seems like you have a mess on your hands and to be honest what you described is totally confusing. I don't think your issue is just sitemap related, or "ubersitemap", whatever that is. Since you are so new you can't really show us the site. Anybody that gave you a remedy would be guessing.
Thanks for the input Badboy..I've since learned that what I was describing as a 'ubersitemap' is called a Sitemap Index File. So let's start there... If a company has a single set of pages, with 3 domains pointed at these same pages, would a Sitemap Index File be a good way to allow webtools to recognize it doesn't need to crawl all 3 domains? ...ie pages crawled for one are the same for the other two? If this is the right approach, would we simply submit the same Indexfile for each domain in webtools? Thanks again!
Thanks again for input- In case anyone runs into something similar, it looks like this thread is getting close to what we are looking for: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/forum/index.php/topic,3428.0.html Assuming I keep this role, I'm sure I will have new questions soon so thanks again! ZS