Today's the day... londonfgss.com becomes lfgss.com

Working great for me now :) Thanks!

I think I'm done... if anyone spots errors from this point onwards, please let me know.

Now this is done, I need a hand to help search engines detect the change.

Could those of you who use Firefox please consider adding this extension:
http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/

It basically fetches site popularity data from key websites, and in doing so tells them this site exists and is popular... which I believe has the knock-on effect of encouraging them to visit the site.

It will also have the side effect of helping other cycling sites that we're collectively likely to visit to be indexed too (as the search engines will discover those too).

VB, you are a deity in our midst. How does one person get born with so much brain power?

I suppose it all balances out in nature, which explains my lack of said abilities.

The official celebration of the dropping of "ondon" will take place at East Drinks tonight. oh yes.

i have downloaded that thing, not entirely sure why

:/

I have also downloaded and installed this Page Rank doodah. I am also unsure why. VB can you divert a couple of braincells to explain why?

The official celebration of the dropping of "ondon" will take place at East Drinks tonight. oh yes.

Will ondine be there?

Very clever punnage. Will you?

I can't spell lfgss. Someone help!

I have also downloaded and installed this Page Rank doodah. I am also unsure why. VB can you divert a couple of braincells to explain why?

If search engines have finite resources to index pages on websites, then they want to use the resources they have the best they can.

So they will index pages on "popular" sites before they index pages on less-popular sites.

As we've changed from londonfgss.com which was popular, to lfgss.com which is currently an unknown quantity... I want to use the search engines own tools to declare to them, "Hey, we're popular... come index us".

The domain name change may well impact how we're indexed in Google, Yahoo and Bing... we might go from having hundreds of thousands of indexed pages to none. And that means people won't find the site when they want to... it might also have a knock-on effect on other cycling sites because of PageRank.

PageRank is Google's theory that the importance of a site is based on an equation that describes how sites link to each other. Londonfgss was important, lfgss isn't. Links here to other sites have a value relative to our importance... if we're unimportant then the link to others sites is also unimportant and doesn't count... so other small cycling websites will have a much lower PageRank if lfgss isn't in the index.

This is all based on a theory that I have tested and do believe to be true, which is that Google, Alexa, Yahoo, etc use their "popularity" indicators not just to display site popularity but also as a measuring tool. They will know that if they have a thousand requests to ask whether lfgss is important, then by virtue of the number of requests it must be... and going back to that first paragraph, important sites should be indexed... and then look at the middle penultimate paragraph, if lfgss is important then everyone we have linked to gets some added importance too.

All make sense?

Will ondine be there?

not now, don't like the sound of that very much

All those (3) awesome posts I made in 2007 will be lost forever... FOREVER>>>>>>!!!!!! ARRRGHHV

Londonfgss was important, lfgss isn't.

Won't search engine bots crawling existing links automatically get redirected to lfgss.com?

I'm sure I'm missing something extremely obvious, but wouldn't it be likely that the search engine companies have mechanisms in place that anticipate sites changing domain names and such things and automatically make adjustments?

All those (3) awesome posts I made in 2007 will be lost forever... FOREVER>>>>>>!!!!!! ARRRGHHV

Good, that makes me feel reassured that dicki is safe.

Won't search engine bots crawling existing links automatically get redirected to lfgss.com?

Yes. But only as they discover the changes. I want to use their tools to tell them about the changes rather than rely on them just discovering it.

Ah, OK.

Very clever punnage. Will you?

No, I'm afraid not. Sorry. I'll try to make it soon!

...

youve posted this everywhere but NOT THE STOLEN BIKES THREAD.

Got your attention

#spam

but if i do see it now, i'm probably not going to ring or email him

#spamfail

How do you even dig up a thread like this? Epic UTFS fail.

I am sorry for your loss.

What if the theft and the forum name change are somehow related...