Need sitemap opinion on large franchise network with thousands of subdomains

[jozwikjp]

Working on a large franchise network with thousands of subdomains. There is the primary corporate domain which basically directs traffic to store locators and then to individual locations.  The stores sell essentially the same products with some variations on pricing so lots of pages with the same product descriptions.

Different content

• All the subdomains have their location information address info in the header, footer and geo meta tags on every page.
• Page titles customized with franchise store id numbers.

Duplicate content

• Product description blocks.

Franchisee domains will likely have the ability to add their own content in the future but as of right now most of the content short of the blocks on the pages are duplicated.

Likely limitations -- Adding City to page titles will likely be problematic as there could be multiple franchises in the same city.

Ideally it would be nice if users could search for the store or product and have centers return that are closest to them.

We can turn on sitemaps on all the subdomains and try to submit them to the search engines. Looking for insight regarding submitting all these sites or just focusing on the main domain that has a lot less content on it.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

This does sound like a complex scenario - even a bit of a messy one. Ideally, what the brand would have done here was to build a single website with a single store locator taking users to an appropriate landing page based on the city or zip they type in. The single website would feature a single product menu, accessible to all users regardless of city, removing any risk of creating duplicate product description pages. Something along the lines of how REI.com handles their web presence (you might like to show that to the client).

Instead of taking this approach, am I right in understanding that your client got into this thousands-of-subdomains predicaments in order to provide single-user access to a specific franchisee in a specific city, while not allowing him access to the entire website? Or, for some other reason?

[jozwikjp]

There is a main site with the store locator that points to an individual franchise location, however nothing can be purchased from that site.

The franchise is very local oriented, that is why every site has a subdomain. Every Franchise can set their own pricing and product options.

[Slumberjac]

Sounds a very tricky one!

You could look to use an index-sitemap.xml so you can list all of your separate subdomain-sitemaps. that way you'll only need to submit one single sitemap.

I would recommend looking at Screaming Frog to help you do this.

Good luck!

[jozwikjp]

Would I have to validate all xx thousands of subdomains in webmaster tools first?

[Everett]

Ideally yes, you would have a separate XML Sitemap file and Google Search Console profile, as well as a separate (and combined) Google Analytics view for each of the thousands of subdomains.

If that is not possible, at the very least you should have a sitemap that includes every indexable page on the primary site, as well as an XML sitemap on each subdomain, which is linked to in that subdomain's own Robots.txt file.

According to the XML sitemaps protocol, XML sitemap files can not contain URLs from different domains. This includes subdomains. You have to keep all URLs to a single domain per XML sitemap. See sitemaps explained for more info.

As for the Title Tag thing, I don't see why you couldn't have a street name AND city -- or neighborhood and city -- so that they would all be unique, while still including the city.