I'm running a site which allows users to create subdomains. I'd like to submit these user subdomains to search engines via sitemaps. However, according to the sitemaps protocol (and Google Webmaster Tools), a single sitemap can include URLs from a single host only.
What is the best approach?
At the moment I've the following structure:
--
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap-subdomain.xml
--
I think this approach complies to the sitemaps protocol, however, Google Webmaster Tools give errors for subdomain sitemaps: "URL not allowed. This url is not allowed for a Sitemap at this location."
I've also checked how other sites do it. Eventbrite, for instance, produces sitemaps that contain URLs from multiple subdomains (e.g., see http://www.eventbrite.com/events01.xml.gz). This, however, does not comply with the sitemaps protocol.
What approach do you recommend for sitemaps?
I recently struggled through this and finally got it working. See this thread for more details:
Summary: