Comments on: International SEO? Forget About The Big Brands And Do This Instead

By: Lisa Myers

Lisa Myers — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:45:38 +0000

Hi Andrea, thanks for your comment. I disagree, you can specify a geographic target for a sitemap (whole domain) if it is a non geo specific domain such as .com .net .info etc (you always have been able to), but the really neat thing is that you can also specify the geographic target within the subfolders as you say.

For this purpose the sitemaps of subfolders isn’t strictly for faster crawling but for telling the engines what country and therefore which index to associate the pages in the subfolder for.

By: Andrea Moro

Andrea Moro — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:38:10 +0000

Interesting article, however it contains an error as a you cannot specify the geographical target for a sitemap, but this can be done for subdirectories, which is the only thing you need.

Of course, by having a sitemap would facilitate the crawling of the subsite, and help it ranking faster, but having a sitemap is not strictly a requirement as it is not having in the same subfolder as sitemaps files can be placed even on third party sites.

Hope this avoid a false myth.