Yahoo Virtual domain - zero Google Page Rank

Not all virtual domains are created equal

[mrdelurk]

I created a fantasy art web site for an artist friend of mine, and for the first time, I used Yahoo's virtual domain service instead of <edited with whom I usually deal with. (Yahoo caught me with their $2.99 domain hosting special ad, so I figured I try it.) I'm afraid it was a mistake.

Apparently, the only domain forwarding Yahoo does is, it forwards to the index page. No matter what the URL is, it forwards every URL to the index page. If you want to verify this in the next 2-3 days before the domain is transferred out of Yahoo, try <edited> Both will go to the same index page. This is the weirdest default domain forwarding behavior I ever encountered. I contacted Yahoo 3 times, I got one reply, which was a copy of their general FAQ page, with no information pertinent to this.

Since I could not link to pages other than the index page from the outside world, I couldn't ceate a Google Sitemap with the domain name, or register subpages, etc. I just found out that (probably also because of this forwarding shenanigan) search engines see only the header part of the index page, not its content. So the site's Google Page Rank remained a whopping 0, unsurprisingly.

This situation will change soon, because I put in my request to transfer the domain yesterday. (So if the two above URLs suddenly load right for you, <the new host> already took over) I'm posting this to let everyone know - watch out with those el cheapo virtual domains, not all of them are created equal.

[edited by: tedster at 8:13 am (utc) on May 25, 2006]
[edit reason] remove specifics [/edit]