Looking for re-assurance on this one: Sitemap approach for multi-subdomains

[AABAB]

Hi All:

Just looking for a bit of "yeah it'll be fine" reassurance on this before we go ahead and implement:

We've got a main accommodation listing website under www.* and a separate travel content site using a completely different platform on blog.* (same domain - diffn't sub-domain).  We pull in snippets of content from blog.* > www.* using a feed and we have cross-links going both ways, e.g. links to find accommodation in blog articles and links to blog articles from accommodation listings.

Look-and-feel wise they're fully integrated.  The blog.* site is a tab under the main nav.

What i'd like to do is get Google (and others) to view this whole thing as one site - and attribute any SEO benefit of content on blog.* pages to the www.* domain. Make sense?

So, done a bit of reading - and here's what i've come up with:

1. Seperate sitemaps for each, both located in the root of www site

www.example.com/sitemap-www

www.example.com/sitemap-blog

2. robots.txt in root of www site to have single sitemap entry:

sitemap : www.example.com/sitemap-www

3. robots.txt in root of blog site to have single sitemap entry:

sitemap: www.example.com/sitemap-blog

4. Submit both sitemaps to Webmaster tools.

Does this sound reasonable?  Any better approaches? Anything I'm missing?

All input appreciated!

[Audiohype]

If you are looking for Google to view the site as a whole I would consider moving the subdomain to a subfolder. Especially if the subdomain is integrated into the navigation it makes sense to merge them.

I don't think a sitemap is going to have too much of an effect on the way Google handles the subdomain.

[AABAB]

Thanks Ben.  We'll look to do this in the future.

Maybe with a virtual directory or something.

Cheers!