This just in! Hot off the press: GeoCities is closing October 26,2009.
Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,
We’re writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009. On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.
Holy crap! That is huge news. We knew it was coming this year, but now we know that GeoCities will officially be closing on October 26, 2009. This is huge news, and it’s something that may have an interesting impact on thousands of websites. Let’s find out why.
GeoCities History – For those of you who don’t know about GeoCities, it was really the first place where people like you and me could build personal websites for free. The company was founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI). At first, it was a small web hosting and web development company located in Southern California. But its popularity grew as it created a cool web directory where users could develop free home pages. Users could choose 1 of 6 neighborhoods based on themes.
In 1995, GeoCities would add cities to the mix. Also once known as GeoPages, GeoCities was effectively creating a geographical network of personal homepages. It was like a scaled down version of MySpace, but in 1995 form! Even more like MySpace, you could lie and get a URL in the Paris directory, but actually you were a US citizen living in Macon, GA. GeoCities never went to any lengths to verify any user data. [It turns out that lying about your identity on the internet goes waaaaay back!]
I have been wanting to write this post ever since I heard that GeoCities will be closing sometime in 2009 (official site). I set up my first website on GeoCities back in 1998. When they offered the chance to shorten the URL, I took it, but later I deleted my account because I did not like the HomeBuilder software. Oh well, no big loss. But what about the millions of GeoCities accounts that are still active?
Can you even imagine how many links point to GeoCities and its millions of pages? Yahoo reports 66 million links to the GeoCities domain. That’s a lot of link juice that will simply vanish. Or will it? More on that in a minute.
GeoCities Links in DMOZ – You may not realize this, but DMOZ has tons of links to GeoCities pages. If you know anything about DMOZ, you probably know that there are quite a few dead links in the DMOZ directory. [SEO Tip: If you ever want links from DMOZ, one of the best things to do is check for expired domains in DMOZ. Buy one of those expired domains and 301 redirect it to your site. Pow! There’s your DMOZ link]. Furthermore, a lot categories no longer have editors, and there is no way that the currently-active DMOZ editors will be able to manually remove all of the soon-to-be-dead GeoCities links on DMOZ. Personally, I’m wondering how DMOZ will address the closing of GeoCities.
Many of the GeoCities sites have been around for 10+ years, and some of them even have PR5 and higher. Many of these GeoCities websites have links from DMOZ. And even though some SEOs will tell you that DMOZ is no longer important because it was recently removed from Google’s Webmaster directory recommendations, the truth is that DMOZ STILL MATTERS. I don’t care what anyone says. A link in DMOZ is not going to hurt you. It can only help you.
If GeoCities is closing down, what will happen to all that DMOZ-to-GeoCities link juice? Is there any way to keep my GeoCities site up on the web and keep my link authority?
Keeping Your Link Authority – Here’s where this story gets juicy…link juicy (I’m here all week. Two shows, same jokes). Yahoo is reporting that you can move your GeoCities website to a Yahoo hosting account for $4.99 a month:
Move your site to Yahoo! Web Hosting – We know your files are important to you, and we want to make moving to Web Hosting as easy and affordable as we can. For a limited time, you can move your files automatically, take advantage of terrific features like a personalized domain name and email, even redirect your GeoCities web address to your new site — all for only $4.99 a month for a full year.
This is amazing news. If you sign up with Yahoo Web hosting, Yahoo will place a redirect on your old GeoCities address to your new domain. If Yahoo uses 301 permanent redirects for old GeoCities URLs to new domains, SEOs will rejoice! A 301 redirect will allow you to keep your link juice. To put it plainly: If your GeoCities site has a DMOZ link, you will keep that link juice. A 301 redirect will also allow your site to maintain a lot of the authority, historical trust and PageRank. I’m praying that Yahoo uses 301 redirects for GeoCites sites. [Note: I have not found any specific data about the type of redirect that Yahoo will use.]
The Opportunity for (Grayhat) SEO – If you have ever seen GeoCities sites, you probably noticed that most of them are terrible, and they have not been updated in 10 years. Yet, many GeoCities websites have PR5 or higher. It’s especially aggravating when your awesome modern blog is being outranked by a GeoCities site that hasn’t been updated since 1998. Hmmm…what can you do about that?
Some of the GeoCities pages have contact emails. Why not contact the site owner via email and offer to buy their GeoCities account for $50? They haven’t paid attention to it in 5-10 years. The economy sucks right now. Maybe they’ll want $50. Who knows? It could work. Find a PR5 GeoCities site that is ranking well in your vertical. Buy the site, and then you’ll have 2 sites in the top SERPs. And you can add a link to your site from the GeoCities site.
The downside is that you will have to pay $4.99 a month for Yahoo Web hosting account. But where else are you going to find a PR5 website with a DMOZ link for $50 + $4.99 hosting? And who knows? Maybe one day you will be able to 301 redirect the GeoCities URL to your site. It’ll just depend on the technical details of Yahoo’s redirect method. If that happens, I hope you grab several GeoCities accounts, especially the ones with high PR and DMOZ links.
Also, something I didn’t mention: The image search ramifications of GeoCities closing down. Just think of all the pictures hosted by GeoCities. Many of those pictures are trusted and rank very high in image search because they have been up since the late 1990’s. There’s probably going to be a noticeable drop in the images index at each search engine.
Good luck!
Guest post by Kerry Dean, owner and author of YourSeoSucks.
While you are thinking of link juice, others will be thinking of the reams of unique content that can be picked up ready for use post 26/10/2009.
David,
I am all over this and I mean I am hunting wabbit as we speak!
Yep! I wanted to keep this post a little more grayhat. But you could easily spend the next few months scraping themed content from GeoCities and then launch a bad ass website on October 27. Or you could just steal the content and put it on your own website in chunks. I know Google time stamps content, and maybe in October Google will have some internal filter that will look for “borrowed” GeoCities content. Maybe they have one already. Maybe not. And don’t forget about the pictures. If you don’t scrape the text, think about scraping some images. Either way, GeoCities closing is an SEO delight.
Kerry,
This was a grand slam post bro! I have been visiting and inventory all GeoCities sites that are in my niche. My inventory is growing and I will send a request to purchase to all those sites that are in DMOZ and have a PR5.
I thought Frank wrote this. It says Frank in the meta. Anyway, very good post. I heard about Geocities closing down several months, which started a bit of a furor about free content in BH syndicates. Had not heard about this possible PR loop-hole though. A good observation.
“GeoCities closing is an SEO delight”
I am not sure that the pursits would agree with that :P
Very, very interesting…I kind of lost track of GeoCities over the past year or two, but that is great news! Awesome post! I plan to put your advise to use. Thanks!
My old geocities was listed in DMOZ… not sure about the PR. I can not seem to get DMOZ to change to my new URL. I even offered to become an editor… they said no. I guess they do not want any help. I wonder why they are so slow.
Unfortunately, DMOZ has lost many editors and it could take months or even a year if you’re lucky.