New Forums Address Messes up Web Search

Karl Roenick

Top Post Dawg
Joined
Sep 22, 1999
Location
Clifton Park, NY, US
I did a search on the web for vw oil pan heaters. One of the hits was where I was stuck on the side of the road when my fuel gelled up. The link however just goes to the Forums home page. Substituting the proper domain made the link work.

Do the search engines ever catch up with something like this?

It's nice to think that a web search would actually lead to these topics that could help somebody.

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Yellow 2000 Beetle
 

VW Derf

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Jul 3, 1996
Location
Richmond, BC, Canada
TDI
2010 Blue Graphite Pearl Golf Variant
Hi Karl,

There was a side effect when we changed over to the new domains. The search engine broke.
I have a call in with the forum software creators and they have already escalated the problem up to level 2. Hopefully they will have a fix shortly. If you have any bookmarks you wish to preseve though, just replace the "tdiforums.abahn.bc.ca" in the url with "forums.tdiclub.com" and it will find the correct topic.

Fred

[This message has been edited by VW Derf (edited August 15, 2000).]
 

Karl Roenick

Top Post Dawg
Joined
Sep 22, 1999
Location
Clifton Park, NY, US
This was a Lycos search on the Internet as a whole. And I got a hit on my thread from last winter! I don't know if you'll be able to fix this, unless there was more intricate redirection.
 

VW Derf

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Jul 3, 1996
Location
Richmond, BC, Canada
TDI
2010 Blue Graphite Pearl Golf Variant
Opps, I didn't read the complete title. Unfortunatly this is the case. There is a posiblity of having it address automatically to the new url, but the only way to remove the old URLs is to make them invalid. I probably won't have the abahn address much longer, so I'm hoping the search engines will automatically correct this as time goes on.
 

GoFaster

Moderator at Large
Joined
Jun 16, 1999
Location
Brampton, Ontario, Canada
TDI
2006 Jetta TDI
What about all the places where various threads are linked using the abahn address? Like inside the FAQ (I checked, there's a few links to threads in the performance section which use the old name), and every thread where someone refers to another thread?

Is there a mass search-and-replace that you can do? If not, I don't envy the editing job required to fix this!

Brian
 

VW Derf

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Jul 3, 1996
Location
Richmond, BC, Canada
TDI
2010 Blue Graphite Pearl Golf Variant
I have yet to go through the web site yet, but I did write a script that went through and changed all the references in the forums from abahn to tdiclub. So even really old ones should all work now. This means that everything on forums.tdiclub.com has been fixed. www.tdiclub.com still requires some attention
This is one of the downfalls for doing this change, but it only gets worse the longer I wait.

PS if you find any tdiforums.abahn.bc.ca links in the forums, please let me know. In TDIclub, I hope to get them rectivied this weekend.
 
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