At Inithouse, a studio shipping a growing portfolio of products in parallel, we run an AI photo animation tool across five country domains from a single codebase. The product turns a static photo into a short living video: zivafotka.cz for Czech users, zivafotka.sk for Slovak, zywafotka.pl for Polish, alivephoto.online for English, and lebendigfoto.de for German.
Sounds clean on paper. One repo, five builds, five domains. In practice, we walked into every trap the setup could offer. Here are five that cost us the most time.
Mistake 1: One sitemap for all five domains
We started with a single sitemap.xml generated at build time, served identically on every domain. Google indexed the Czech pages fine, then ignored almost everything else. The crawl budget went to whichever domain Google hit first, and hreflang tags pointed in circles because every sitemap referenced every other domain with no clear canonical signal.
What we changed: Each domain now gets its own sitemap listing only its own URLs, with hreflang pointing to the matching pages on sibling domains. Crawl distribution improved within two weeks.
