Do search engines penalize web sites on virual servers? Do virtual
servers get listed as quickly on some/all engines? Do virtual servers
cause lower positions on search engines if/when listed?

Hi 1hall,

Good day and thanks for your question.

No, search engines do not penalize websites on virtual servers. The
search engine's crawler (or spider) is concerned only with your domain
name and not your IP address (unless you submit your IP address).

Virtual servers are treated no different from other sites. I have done
an extensive search on the internet to locate any information on the
same, and I have not come across any information on any of the search
engines/other websites regarding this.

Again, virtual server hosted sites are not ranked based on what they
are hosted on. In fact, when the spider/crawler visits the website, it
is not concerned what sort of server it is running on. It is only
concerned about the content on the webpages.

The most popular search engine, Google, has put all a webmaster needs
to know about it's indexing/ranking/listing methods. Please visit
://www.google.com/webmasters/

If you have any clarifications, please don't hesitate to ask.

Thank you for using this service and have a nice day

Warm regards,
aditya2k

---

Request for Answer Clarification by 1hall-ga on 15 Jul 2003 15:02 PDT

aditya2k-ga
Hi back
Many thanks that helps following is a comment from our submission
service, any comment? I hope I am not taking advantage but this is
really confusing to me. Jack

Hi:

Actually we have found very few web hosts who understand this problem
or even know how it works They tend to defend their position based on
business position rather than facts.

Websites that are virtually hosted will eventually get listed and over
time will do OK in some areas. This is true.. If you don't mind
waiting for listings to arrive you don't need to make any changes. We
are only saying if you want increased performance this is what is
causing the slow down. Nothing more, we don't provide web hosting so
have nothing in that area to gain by you moving!

Virtually hosted websites use HTTP 1.1 to make it all work Search
Engines use a protocol called HTTP 1.0 which doesn't support virtual
hosting. So when the search engine visits it only sees the page from
the web hosts server.

When we do request for your website using HTTP 1.0 To prove my point
let me show what the meta tags on your web hosts server look like when
a HTTP 1.0 is used (see below) when a request is made for your
website. This of course is not an issue in a browser since all
browsers use the newer protocol. I am sure you will recognize the
example below looks nothing like the pages on NoSnoreZone, right?

Search engines are now smart enough to know this could very well be a
virtually hosted website and will eventually come back and check using
HTTP 1.1 but will remove a few points from your score for not being
HTTP 1.0 capable. Any experienced search engine optimizer or forum
will explain the importance of a unique IP for those wanting optimum
results on the search engines.

We are not saying you need to move or doing anything we have noticed
your listings are progressing slower than usual and have noted that
this is the cause. If your webhost can provide you with a unique IP
address you will get improved results.

HEAD>
<TITLE>-= MegaWebServers.com =-</TITLE>
<META name="KEYWORDS" content= "e-mail, mail, servers, server, mail
servers, email, LAN, WAN, internet, network ">

<style type="text/css">
<!--
A  {text-decoration: none;}
-->
</style>
</HEAD>

here is an excerpt from the body of the page presented:

Internetnamesforbusiness, meganameservers.com, megamailservers.com and
megawebservers.com take a ZERO TOLERANCE approach to SPAMMERS.  We
host
over 550,000 email accounts on over 100,000 domains, most with web
sites.
Given our size, we do have spammers who attempt to use us as a base
for their domains.  We are very unfriendly toward spammers and remove
them immediately, once it has been verified that they are
intentionally
abusing the Internet.  The primary forms of abuse that we do not
tolerate
are unsolicited commercial email or Usenet spam, either using their
domain or
directing users in any way to their domain and assisting spammers with
tools, email lists, etc.

When you do a specific page the search engine initially sees this.
Notice the 404 Not Found.

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 18:30:51 GMT
Server: Apache
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

---

Clarification of Answer by aditya2k-ga on 21 Jul 2003 12:03 PDT

This looks like an advertising gimmic to me.

Some Non-virtual servers use HTTP 1.1, and so obviously what was
mentioned in that message is untrue.