How to manage Google Search Console properties across a subdomain fleet
A developer running over twenty sites on subdomains of a single domain shares lessons learned from structuring Google Search Console properties. Search Console offers two property types: a domain property covering all subdomains in aggregate, and URL-prefix properties scoping data to individual sites. The author recommends owning both types simultaneously, using prefix properties for per-site monitoring and the domain property for overall coverage. A key pitfall highlighted is the Sitemaps API returning a 403 error that can be mistaken for a missing sitemap, making it essential to track an 'unknown' state separately from a 'missing' one. The author also warns that SC's submitted URL count reflects the last crawl, not live data, and recommends fetching live sitemaps and diffing them against Search Console figures to catch stale indexing.
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