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

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?