: Creating more than one sitemap and relating it to a subdomain - will I be penalized? I'm thinking in creating a subdomain containing all the reviews from my products, for example: http://reviews.mystore.com

@Tiffany637

There are two things incorrect here.


A canonical tag should only be implemented on pages that are identical or vastly similar. Your review page will not be vastly similar to your product page as it will have content from the reviews that (I presume) does not appear on the product page.
If a page is canonicalised too another page, then it should not be included in a sitemap.xml file. Only valid pages that you wish to be indexed should be included in sitemap.xml files, if a page has a canonical tag referencing another page you are telling Google you do not wish that page to be indexed.


From Google guidelines:


Pick a canonical (preferred) URL for each of your pages, and tell us
about your preference by submitting these canonical URLs in a sitemap.


With the example you gave in the comments for grandslamnewyork.com you can see this is not having any effect.

In their sitemap they have this review URL, that has a canonical URL pointing to the main product page. If you pick one of the reviews lower down on the review URL (one that appears on the paginated pages of reviews on the main product page, which are loaded via java script so Google doesnt see them on the product page) and search for that exact content in Google nothing is indexed for it: Click Here and the review page itself is not indexed in Google either: Click Here.

So what does this show? To me it shows that what ever they are trying to do has no effect. The review pages don't get indexed as they have a canonical pointing to the main page, so this means the reviews that are loaded via the java script but appear on the reviews pages don't get indexed either. So as far as I can tell, this methord offers no SEO value what so ever.

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