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Summary
The definitions of "shoujo-ai" and "yuri" are nebulous and vary from person to person. There is no agreed upon definition for either term. The most common difference between the two terms among English speakers is a measure of explicitness, but that distinction is meaningless on Gaia anyway, because of Gaia's policy of no explicit content at all. The official guild policy is to treat these terms as synonyms, with equal meanings.

Introduction
"Yuri" and "shoujo-ai" are both made-up terms, roughly imported from Japanese, that are used to refer to lesbian romances in art, stories, shows or roleplays. Specifically, English speakers use them almost exclusively to refer to lesbian romances in anime and manga.

"Yuri" is a made-up word in Japanese, written in Japanese as ゆり or ユリ, with two widely accepted etymologies. The first is that the first widely distributed gay magazine in Japan in the early 70's invented specifically Japanese terms to refer to gays and lesbians, possibly to avoid the negative stigma associated with Western terms and ideas about homosexuality. The magazine was named after the term for gay men, who were referred to as barazoku, or 薔薇族 (ばらぞく or バラゾク), which means "the rose tribe" (from bara or 薔薇 (ばら or バラ), meaning "rose" (the flower) and -zoku or 族 (ぞく or ゾク) for "tribe"). The reason for this is that the rose is apparently the traditional Japanese symbol for gay men and gay love, although I have not been able to confirm that. Lesbians were referred to as yurizoku, or 百合族 (ゆりぞく or ユリゾク), which means "the lily tribe" (yuri or 百合 (ゆり or ユリ), meaning "lily"), because the traditional Japanese symbol for lesbians and lesbian love is apparently the lily. Over time, just the "yuri" part came to signify anything lesbian in art, stories, shows or roleplays.

The second widely accepted etymology for "yuri" is that the term "yaoi" was achieving widespread use for referring to art, stories, shows or roleplays involving gay (as in guy-guy) romance, and "yuri" was a natural counterpart for it. Some dispute that, saying "yuri" was in widespread use first, and "yaoi" was coined because of it. The truth is probably somewhere in between the two theories.

"Shoujo-ai", also written as "shoujoai", "shōjo-ai" or "shōjoai", translates literally as "young woman love" or "girl love", from the Japanese 少女愛 (しょうじょあい or ショウジョアイ) which is 少女 (しょうじょ or ショウジョ) for "young woman" and 愛 (あい or アイ) for "love".

Japanese roots
Neither term is used in English according to its actual Japanese root meaning. Even in Japanese, the meanings are rather colloquial and nebulous. In Japan, the term "shoujo-ai" is almost never used, because of its association with "shounen-ai" (literally translated, it is the female form of the term), which is used to describe sexual relations between a man and an underage, young boy. "Yuri" is also not often used. The preferred term in Japan is "girls love" or "girl love", usually contracted to "GL". Of course, a native Japanese speaker will have no problem understanding you if you use either "shoujo-ai" or "yuri".

English use
There is no universally agreed upon English definition for either "yuri" or "shoujo-ai", and of course, the terms are not really used in Japan, so no guidance can be found by examining the native usage, either.

There are, however, several competing conventions. The most commonly used convention describes increasing levels of sexually explicit content using different terms. "Shoujo-ai" is often used to refer to art, stories, shows or roleplays that have very little, or even no sexually explicit content. By contrast, "yuri" often denotes explicit content.

Another common usage is based on the idea of intent, as opposed to pure content. In this usage, "shoujo-ai" describes a work of art, a story, show or roleplay that focusses more on the emotional aspects of a lesbian relationship than on the physical. If the focus of the story is the characters and the emotional lesbian love they share, it would be called "shoujo-ai", regardless of the actual amount of explicitness, if any. "Yuri", then, refers to anything that focusses more on physical lesbian sex, and is relatively unconcerned about emotional attachments or even plot in some cases. This usage makes the terms "shoujo-ai" and "yuri" analogous to "art" ("romantic art", possibly even erotic romantic art) and "pornography".

And of course, yet another usage is to treat the terms as synonyms. This is quite common because searching for the term "shoujo-ai" yields fewer superfluous results than searching for "yuri". On the other hand "yuri" is simply easier to type and has no other spellings in common use, making searching easier.

Guild policy
Because pornography of any kind is simply not allowed on Gaia, it makes no sense to have a term that refers specifically to it here. Why bother to differentiate between sexy and pornographic images when there will never be any images of the pornographic kind?

Because of this, we use the terms interchangeably, and, of course, always to refer only to lesbian content that is allowed on Gaia.

On our front page, and in our guild's name, of course, we use both terms, to facilitate easy searching of the GGN. When you search for a guild with either "yuri" or "shoujo-ai", our guild shows up.

Within the guild itself, however, we will tend to use "yuri" more so than "shoujo-ai", because, as far as we're concerned, there is no difference between them, and "yuri" is simply shorter and easier to type.

Please note that this is not because we condone pornographic content on Gaia, or because we want to focus more on the physical rather than the emotional aspect of lesbian love, it's simply because we can't be bothered to type out "shoujo-ai" when "yuri" is so much shorter and doesn't require reaching for the dash key. To us, both terms are identical, and cover all lesbian content, romantic or just racy, that is allowed on Gaia.

Conclusion
There is no agreed upon definition for either "yuri" or "shoujo-ai", and most of the common definitions just don't apply to Gaia's limited content policies. The only practical solution is to make the two terms have identical meanings.

On our front page, and in our title, we use both terms to make us show up in more searches, but in general, using both terms is pointless.

Of course, if we consider both terms to be identical, it makes no sense to type out "shoujo-ai" when "yuri" means the same thing and is so much easier to type. Therefore, we tend to use the term "yuri" more often than "shoujo-ai".