question about a yahoo guideline

Can somebody explain what exactly is meant by virtual hostnames

[koen]

In the yahoo guidelines (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html) it reads:

Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames

as unwanted. Can somebody explain what exactly is meant by virtual hostnames?

[soapystar]

can someone explain what is meant by guidelines?

Arent these actually only internal guides for the review team?

virtual names are like all those subdomains used by yahoo like travel.yahoo and a bunch of others....

[koen]

As far as I understand it it can mean a couple of things:
-what you said: an internal guideline for reviewers
-a number of factors the search engine takes into consideration when calculating the relative value of a page
-an external guideline so as to move website creators to better quality pages
-a combination of the above

So I guess yahoo doesn't like subdomains then. But what would qualify as too much and unnecessary?

[Freedom]

As sarcastic as that post is, it's 110 percent true in my experience, (and I have some experience in getting banned websites back into Yahoo).

I blame it on them being Californian.

[koen]

Uhm, does that also count for an inbound link page like a sitemap?

[abates]

I interpret "Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames" as meaning sites which have a large number of aliased domains.

e.g. www.example1.com, www.example2.com, www.example3.com, www.blueandgreenwidgets.com, www.examplewidgets.com all lead to the same site in an effort to dominate the SERPs.

I can't see any reason why they'd object to subdomains without an overriding factor.

[soapystar]

virtual does not mean real

[martinibuster]

I can't see any reason why they'd object to subdomains without an overriding factor...

You can take anything that a normal webmaster does and find a way to abuse it. So while About.com or a .edu may have a legitimate reason to use hundreds of subdomains, there are others who will figure out an angle to abuse it.

Obviously from the way the guideline is worded (and by what is observable on the Yahoo serps), not everything with a subdomain is getting banned.

Let's keep to the topic of this thread:

question about a yahoo guideline
Can somebody explain what exactly is meant by virtual hostnames?

[soapystar]

nobody can answer this because the true definition means "not real" domain....other than cnames and such... subdomains are real...so the wording is incorrect in IMHO given what they are trying to say....

[abates]

martinibuster: that's what I mean by an overriding factor. If the webmaster is using hundreds of subdomains to try to game the results and they get caught, I'm sure Yahoo (and Google and the other search engines) will have a problem with it.

I'm saying if you use subdomains in a legitimate manner as about.com does, I can't see why Yahoo would have a problem with it.

[soapystar]

abates..

the problem as i it see from your angle is that you are applying logic.....

your saying why would they have a problem and if i dont see why then it cant be the right answer....the fact is its in the guidelines..it doesnt matter if it makes sense or not.....

they arent rules.....

[abates]

Heh, logic merely allows one to be wrong with authority. :)

[koen]

Just stumbled on the following:

[httpd.apache.org...]

The term Virtual Host refers to the practice of maintaining more than one server on one machine, as differentiated by their apparent hostname.

So what yahoo says is incompatible with the meaning of virtual host as here defined.

[soapystar]

looking at it another way..if you really wanted to make it clear what you were looking for from webmasters would you really phrase it the way they do?

[abates]

Virtual hostnames implies something different to virtual hosting to me... I'm with soapystar - this guideline is really unclear as to what they're meaning.

many aliased/parked domain names is still my best guess as to what they mean. Maybe someone should ask? :)