Moved sitemaps to a different subdomain and losing search referrals around the same time. Red herring or correlation?

Posted by er1234 on Pro Webmasters See other posts from Pro Webmasters or by er1234
Published on 2013-12-02T22:48:40Z Indexed on 2014/06/02 21:47 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 188

We started to lose search referral traffic around the same time that I moved some of our sitemaps to a subdomain. Could this have hurt us?

I followed Google's steps to creating a sitemap under a different subdomain. The new sitemaps.foo.com subdomain is being crawled and indexed well.

Both www.foo.com and sitemaps.foo.com have been verified in Google Webmaster Tools. They appear as distinct sites. Is this correct? I can't find a way in Webmaster Tools to say "Hey, sitemaps.foo.com is really owned by www.foo.com, so show them together and make sure to attribute sitemaps.foo urls to www.foo"

Our www.foo.com/robots.txt

Sitemap: http://www.foo.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://sitemaps.foo.com/subdir/sitemap.xml.gz

© Pro Webmasters or respective owner

Related posts about seo

Related posts about google-webmaster-tools