Your documentation should live on your domain
Every page of documentation you publish on a vendor’s subdomain is a page that ranks for the vendor. It is the quietest tax in developer tooling.
The tax nobody quotes you
You write a guide. It answers a question people search for. It ranks — for vendor.io/yourcompany/docs. The traffic is real, the authority accrues to the vendor's domain, and the day you leave, the links you earned leave with them.
What has to be true instead
Three things, and all three have to hold:
The pages answer on your domain. Not a redirect, not a frame — served there.
Every canonical names your address. A canonical URL is an instruction to search engines about which copy is real. Point it at the vendor and you have asked Google to rank them instead of you.
The sitemap lists your URLs. A sitemap served at
docs.yourcompany.comthat lists vendor URLs is a sitemap for somebody else's site, and it is read as exactly that.
How it works here
Add the hostname, prove it with a TXT record, point a CNAME. From then on, pages answer on your domain, canonicals name your addresses, and /sitemap.xml on your domain lists only your URLs. Publish several spaces on one domain and you get one sitemap index covering all of them, which is the single address you hand to Search Console.
That is the whole feature. It should not be a feature — it should be the default — but here we are.
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