I am availing Yahoo India's web hosting plan. The good things about the service are :
. Unlimited space
. Competitive rates
. Decent Hosting Control Panel with web based FTP etc.
. No service outages
. Good brand to give you confidence that they will continue to exist
There is a big BUT following this. This specially concerns any website which is looking to be SEO (search engine optimization) friendly, which these days everyone is.
Yahoo web hosting doesn't allow ".htaccess" modifications. Which most of the other web hosting solution providers out there provide because of it being so important for SEO. But Yahoo doesn't.
".htaccess" is a VERY important SEO feature. There are some really cool things that can be done that are a must for SEO. Listing below are things that can be done:
. Friendly URL : This feature allows every page on your site to be access with a Search engine friendly URL. Something like : "http://www.website.com/posts/the-topic-of-my-page-post.html"
versus something like "http://www.website.com/posts.php?postid=462"
The difference between the two version that are pointing to the same page post on your site, is that the friendly version of the URL contains post topic keywords. These keywords in the URL are ranked very highly by search engines and are more likely to rank your pages higher in searches. This is possible only through ".htaccess" modification which is not allowed by Yahoo.
. 404 redirect : As your website grows big, over a period of time there could be broken links because of moved/deleted posts/content. This problem of dead links pointing to non-existent content is where your search engine bot might land and find that a link to your site is dead link. It is possible that the search engine reduces its confidence in such sites, if there are too many such cases. Way to deal with this problem is to modify ".htaccess" to redirect any request to a non-existent content/page to something more meaningful, like your home-page with a error-message on top or a some other page which suggests other content on your site or external content which it deems as relevant to the original queried content. Thereby dealing with the problem of dead link in a much more algorithmic manner, satisfying search engine to quite an extent.
. 301 redirect : Old URL to new URL modification. For example if for any reason (change of topic of a post after it was first published) the URL of a page changes. It could again lead to dead link scenario described above. 301 redirects can be done through ".htaccess" modification, can make the request of the old URL converted to request for new URL automatically, hiding the face that there has been a URL change to the bot or the user reading. Again better way to deal with dead URL problem, and thats why good for SEO.
. Above mentioned are some basic things that are must have's for SEO done through ".htaccess" modifications. However there are some more advanced things that could be done as well, which sound like rarely used practically, like - accessing certain IPs only, prevent Image HOT linking, disable director browsing etc.
Other things being rarely used alright, BUT the top three SEO uses of ".htaccess" are considered must haves and simply can not be ignored. There are sites like www.woorank.com which give you a SEO rank based on how SEO friendly your website is and give you important tips on what could be the things to improve. These sites also look at features which are implantable only through ".htaccess" and unfortunately can not be done on Yahoo web-hosting.
To be fair to Yahoo web-hosting, it should be mentioned why they do not allow ".htaccess" modifications, there reasoning is that it exposes security risks. Considering this coming from the internet giant's technical experts, this might be right BUT how do we make justify :
. Most of the other web-hosting solution providers allowing this ".htaccess" modifications ?
. Why does SEO rank the features as important and expect them to be present ?
. Isn't this something that everyone out there is doing (more importantly your competing websites) and you might be losing out on a important dimension while your competitors have it.
Overall this sounds like an overkill that Yahoo web-hosting technical team is going after security wise and should be changed, my2c. Do share thoughts.
. Unlimited space
. Competitive rates
. Decent Hosting Control Panel with web based FTP etc.
. No service outages
. Good brand to give you confidence that they will continue to exist
There is a big BUT following this. This specially concerns any website which is looking to be SEO (search engine optimization) friendly, which these days everyone is.
Yahoo web hosting doesn't allow ".htaccess" modifications. Which most of the other web hosting solution providers out there provide because of it being so important for SEO. But Yahoo doesn't.
".htaccess" is a VERY important SEO feature. There are some really cool things that can be done that are a must for SEO. Listing below are things that can be done:
. Friendly URL : This feature allows every page on your site to be access with a Search engine friendly URL. Something like : "http://www.website.com/posts/the-topic-of-my-page-post.html"
versus something like "http://www.website.com/posts.php?postid=462"
The difference between the two version that are pointing to the same page post on your site, is that the friendly version of the URL contains post topic keywords. These keywords in the URL are ranked very highly by search engines and are more likely to rank your pages higher in searches. This is possible only through ".htaccess" modification which is not allowed by Yahoo.
. 404 redirect : As your website grows big, over a period of time there could be broken links because of moved/deleted posts/content. This problem of dead links pointing to non-existent content is where your search engine bot might land and find that a link to your site is dead link. It is possible that the search engine reduces its confidence in such sites, if there are too many such cases. Way to deal with this problem is to modify ".htaccess" to redirect any request to a non-existent content/page to something more meaningful, like your home-page with a error-message on top or a some other page which suggests other content on your site or external content which it deems as relevant to the original queried content. Thereby dealing with the problem of dead link in a much more algorithmic manner, satisfying search engine to quite an extent.
. 301 redirect : Old URL to new URL modification. For example if for any reason (change of topic of a post after it was first published) the URL of a page changes. It could again lead to dead link scenario described above. 301 redirects can be done through ".htaccess" modification, can make the request of the old URL converted to request for new URL automatically, hiding the face that there has been a URL change to the bot or the user reading. Again better way to deal with dead URL problem, and thats why good for SEO.
. Above mentioned are some basic things that are must have's for SEO done through ".htaccess" modifications. However there are some more advanced things that could be done as well, which sound like rarely used practically, like - accessing certain IPs only, prevent Image HOT linking, disable director browsing etc.
Other things being rarely used alright, BUT the top three SEO uses of ".htaccess" are considered must haves and simply can not be ignored. There are sites like www.woorank.com which give you a SEO rank based on how SEO friendly your website is and give you important tips on what could be the things to improve. These sites also look at features which are implantable only through ".htaccess" and unfortunately can not be done on Yahoo web-hosting.
To be fair to Yahoo web-hosting, it should be mentioned why they do not allow ".htaccess" modifications, there reasoning is that it exposes security risks. Considering this coming from the internet giant's technical experts, this might be right BUT how do we make justify :
. Most of the other web-hosting solution providers allowing this ".htaccess" modifications ?
. Why does SEO rank the features as important and expect them to be present ?
. Isn't this something that everyone out there is doing (more importantly your competing websites) and you might be losing out on a important dimension while your competitors have it.
Overall this sounds like an overkill that Yahoo web-hosting technical team is going after security wise and should be changed, my2c. Do share thoughts.
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