McGarrah Technical Blog

Managing Multiple Jekyll Sites Under One Domain: Sitemap Challenges

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Running multiple Jekyll sites under a single custom domain creates unique challenges for SEO and sitemap management. This post explores the complexities of managing mcgarrah.org (main blog) and mcgarrah.org/resume (separate Jekyll site) as distinct GitHub repositories while maintaining proper search engine indexing.

Why This Matters: The AdSense Wake-Up Call

This isn’t just a theoretical SEO concern. During my ongoing AdSense approval debugging, I discovered that the multi-site architecture creates concrete problems that affect how Google evaluates the domain:

The robots.txt Problem

The robots.txt specification requires the file to live at the domain root — https://mcgarrah.org/robots.txt. You cannot place a robots.txt at /resume/robots.txt and have crawlers respect it. This means the main blog’s robots.txt governs the entire domain, but it has no awareness of the resume site’s structure.

My blog’s robots.txt allows /resume/ (good), but the resume site has no way to add its own crawl directives.

The Placeholder Description Problem

The resume site shipped with the default theme description: "A beautiful Jekyll theme for creating a Resume". Google crawls mcgarrah.org/resume as part of the same domain it’s evaluating for AdSense. Template placeholder text on any subpath hurts the overall domain quality signal.

This was an easy fix — just updating _config.yml in the resume repo — but it illustrates how a separate repository can silently degrade the main site’s SEO without anyone noticing.

The Missing SEO Infrastructure

The resume site originally had no jekyll-seo-tag plugin, so its pages lacked:

Google saw these pages as part of mcgarrah.org but with noticeably worse SEO markup than the blog pages. This inconsistency may have contributed to the “site isn’t ready” rejections.

What I’ve Fixed So Far

| Issue | Status | |——-|——–| | Placeholder description | ✅ Fixed — updated to real description | | Missing jekyll-seo-tag | ✅ Fixed — added plugin and `

Managing Multiple Jekyll Sites Under One Domain: Sitemap Challenges | McGarrah Technical Blog

` tag to resume head | | Missing jekyll-sitemap | ✅ Fixed — added plugin to resume repo | | robots.txt for /resume/ | ❌ Not possible — robots.txt must be at domain root | | Unified sitemap | ✅ Fixed — sitemapindex.xml at domain root references both sitemaps |

The rest of this article explores the sitemap problem and potential solutions.

The Multi-Site Architecture

My setup involves two separate Jekyll sites deployed to the same domain:

GitHub Pages makes this easy to set up — the main repo gets the custom domain, and project repos deploy to subpaths. But it creates several SEO problems that aren’t obvious until you start looking at what Google actually sees.

Problem 1: Fragmented Sitemaps

Each Jekyll site generates its own sitemap.xml:

Google Search Console expects a unified sitemap for the domain, but gets fragmented coverage. The main sitemap has no knowledge of the resume pages, and the resume sitemap only covers its own content.

Problem 2: Cross-Site URL References

The main blog links to /resume/ in its navigation and footer, but Jekyll’s jekyll-sitemap plugin only knows about files in its own repository. The resume pages are invisible to the main site’s sitemap generation.

Problem 3: Canonical URL Conflicts

Both sites need consistent canonical URL configuration, but they’re managed independently. If one site uses https://mcgarrah.org and the other uses https://www.mcgarrah.org, Google sees conflicting signals about the authoritative domain.

Potential Solutions

The sitemaps.org protocol supports sitemap index files that reference multiple sitemaps. Create a sitemapindex.xml at the domain root:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://mcgarrah.org/sitemap.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2025-01-01T00:00:00+00:00</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
    <loc>https://mcgarrah.org/resume/sitemap.xml</loc>
    <lastmod>2025-01-01T00:00:00+00:00</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Submit this to Google Search Console instead of the individual sitemaps. This is the lowest-effort solution — just a static file in the main blog repo, no changes to either site’s build process.

The downside: you need to ensure the resume site actually generates a sitemap.xml (I’ve since added jekyll-sitemap to the resume repo).

Approach 2: Custom Sitemap Template

Replace the jekyll-sitemap plugin with a custom sitemap.xml Liquid template that includes manual entries for the resume site:

---
layout: null
sitemap: false
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  {% for post in site.posts %}
    {% unless post.sitemap == false %}
    <url>
      <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}</loc>
      <lastmod>{{ post.last_modified_at | default: post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
    </url>
    {% endunless %}
  {% endfor %}

  {% for page in site.pages %}
    {% unless page.sitemap == false %}
    <url>
      <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ page.url | replace: '/index.html', '/' }}</loc>
      {% if page.last_modified_at %}
        <lastmod>{{ page.last_modified_at | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
      {% endif %}
    </url>
    {% endunless %}
  {% endfor %}

  <!-- Cross-repo entries for resume site -->
  {% for entry in site.sitemap_urls %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ entry.url }}</loc>
    <lastmod>{{ entry.lastmod }}T00:00:00+00:00</lastmod>
  </url>
  {% endfor %}
</urlset>

With corresponding _config.yml entries:

sitemap_urls:
  - url: "/resume/"
    lastmod: "2025-01-01"
  - url: "/resume/print/"
    lastmod: "2025-01-01"

This gives you full control but means maintaining the sitemap template yourself instead of relying on the plugin. You lose automatic handling of new pages and collections.

Approach 3: GitHub Actions Post-Processing

Keep the jekyll-sitemap plugin for automatic generation, then use a GitHub Actions step to inject additional URLs after the build:

- name: Add resume URLs to sitemap
  run: |
    # Insert resume entries before closing </urlset>
    sed -i '/<\/urlset>/i \
    <url><loc>https://mcgarrah.org/resume/</loc></url>\n\
    <url><loc>https://mcgarrah.org/resume/print/</loc></url>' \
    _site/sitemap.xml

This is a hack, but it works without changing the Jekyll build process. The sed command inserts entries before the closing </urlset> tag.

Jekyll Sitemap Plugin Limitations

The jekyll-sitemap plugin is deliberately simple. It:

These are known limitations. The plugin’s issue tracker has open requests for both features:

Neither has been merged as of this writing.

Alternative Architectures

If the sitemap problem is painful enough, there are more fundamental solutions:

Single Repository Approach

Move resume content into the main repository as a Jekyll collection:

collections:
  resume:
    output: true
    permalink: /resume/:name/

This eliminates the multi-site problem entirely — one repo, one build, one sitemap. But it requires significant work to merge two different Jekyll themes and data structures. I’ve written a separate analysis of this approach.

Subdomain Approach

Separate the sites completely with subdomains:

Each subdomain gets its own robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and Google Search Console property. This is cleaner from an SEO perspective but means the resume is no longer under the main domain’s authority.

After working through the AdSense approval process and hitting these issues firsthand, here’s what I’d actually recommend for sites in this situation:

Short Term: Sitemap Index File

The sitemap index approach is the lowest-effort solution that solves the Google Search Console problem. Create a sitemapindex.xml at the domain root that references both sitemaps, and submit that to Search Console instead of the individual sitemaps.

This doesn’t require changes to either Jekyll site’s build process — just a static file in the main blog repo.

Medium Term: Add jekyll-seo-tag to Resume

The resume site’s lack of structured data is a real SEO gap. Adding jekyll-seo-tag to the resume’s Gemfile and including `

Managing Multiple Jekyll Sites Under One Domain: Sitemap Challenges | McGarrah Technical Blog

` in its <head> would bring its pages up to the same standard as the blog. This is independent of the sitemap problem.

Long Term: Evaluate Merging

The collection-based integration approach is technically sound but requires significant work. The sitemap and SEO problems are the strongest argument for eventually doing this merge — but it’s a project, not a quick fix.

The Bigger Picture

The multi-site architecture on GitHub Pages is a common pattern — many people have a blog and a portfolio or resume as separate repos. It works great for deployment and maintenance. But from Google’s perspective, it’s one domain with inconsistent SEO infrastructure, fragmented sitemaps, and no unified crawl control.

If you’re running this pattern and care about SEO (or AdSense approval), you need to actively manage the gaps. The sitemap index file is the minimum viable fix. Everything else is optimization.

References

Tags: jekyll, github-pages, sitemap, multi-site, domain-management, seo, adsense
Categories: web-development, technical
About the Author: Michael McGarrah is a Cloud Architect with 25+ years in enterprise infrastructure, machine learning, and system administration. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science (AI/ML) from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in Computer Science from NC State University, and is currently pursuing an Executive MBA at UNC Wilmington. LinkedIn · GitHub · ORCID · Google Scholar · Resume