Geocities Closing -End of An Era

[labrocca]

Yahoo! GeoCities: Get a web site with easy-to-use site building tools.

GEOCITIES IS CLOSING ON OCTOBER 26, 2009.

IMHO this is rather interesting news for domainers and webmasters. Geocities was one of the first and oldest free website hosts available. It still had huge amounts of ancient content some ranked high in SERPs. I am not sure how many of you had/have a Geocities account with content but certainly everyone here knows about the service.

How do you think this might effect the internet overall? Will it leave a hole in search engines? I am semi sad about all the content that's about to be deleted.

What if I want to keep my site? - Yahoo! GeoCities Help

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. If you'd like to keep your web site, you'll need to move your site files to another web hosting provider.

Shocking stuff.

 

[Archangel]

It used to be fun using a WYSIWYG editor and making your own website (homepage). But MySpace and Facebook are easier and most ppl abandoned Geocities and Angelfire/Lycos. GoPlay shut down many years ago and it looks like social networking killed Geocities. It makes me sad seeing it go.

 

[satsdifference.com]

Yes, I remember

The Geocities archive is a birthmark of the browser Internet..

One obvious reason why MySpace, Twitter, etc. become popular is because the mainstream doesn't know how to buy a domain, pay for a host, upload to the server, and program a website - This knowledge should spread outside one company's domain towards all people to have their own namespace with open communication across domains..

Google Blogger offers people to use their own domain name (is SEO waning?)..



Have a Special Day,

Yelo

 

[DJ-Sound]

It is sad. But it is outdated. I remember my first website ever was with geocities.

 

[mikesfreedom]

I used Geocities back when Yahoo was king and I think this will effect the search engines in some way. Maybe they should have upgraded it to a free blog host similar to Blogger.

 

[DotSauce]

My first site was on Angelfire :D I had one on GeoCities also. Ah, memories.

I'm not surprised, because it's not profitable for Yahoo. Also, I don't think it will effect search anymore... people are looking for new content, not stuff that was made in 1997.

 

[pixelbypixel]

I began on AngelFire, and then found Geocities, I was so amazed by it and used it all the time. I thought I was a web-dev King! :D

Ahh the memories, poorly layed out designs, sparkly/flashing 'ClipArt' images. *sheds a tear*

 

[Archangel]

Yeah, AngelFire was my only until I switched to a paid host. I learned HTML from modifying AngelFire templates. I feel your pain and find myself weeping, too. I miss those days. But these days, any idiot can make and maintain a myspace/facebook page or a WordPress blog. So although 'homepages' were fun, they're kinda obsolete now.

I began on AngelFire, and then found Geocities, I was so amazed by it and used it all the time. I thought I was a web-dev King! :D

Ahh the memories, poorly layed out designs, sparkly/flashing 'ClipArt' images. *sheds a tear*

 

[enlytend]

I'm not surprised, because it's not profitable for Yahoo. Also, I don't think it will effect search anymore... people are looking for new content, not stuff that was made in 1997.

There were a lot of big "evergreen" hobby / informational sites still on geocities. Ah the good old days - when people built web sites to share information, not just to make money ...

Ahh the memories, poorly layed out designs, sparkly/flashing 'ClipArt' images. *sheds a tear*

Dancing baloney :D! I forget if my first personal site was geocities or (gasp) ao-hell (anyone remember "members pages"?). I pretty much skipped the garish clipart and animated gifs - they totally went against my minimalist/corporate grain . Though I'll fess up to a rainbow bar or two and some borders and backgrounds and frighteningly "web safe" color schemes. And of course, table driven layouts ( it was the only game in town back then!)

But I was spoiled because I got to play on a "real" site at my day job - I have hazy memories of developing pages with text editors* and ... Netscape Composer !

Myspace and Facebook have become Geocities 2.0 :D .

*(I still do that sometimes)

 

[Kate]

The end of an era for sure, but only the veterans remember about geocities.
Plus, archive.org takes care of old contents

 

[matt_bodis]

My first website, I think I was 9 years old - was a Digimon site on GeoCities. Then I had an animated GIFs site. I will never forget lol.

GeoCities and "Paid to Surf" programs, those are like classics.

 

[Archangel]

ePipo owes me still lol I'll never see the cash, after about 8 or 9 years.

"Paid to Surf" programs, those are like classics.

 

[matt_bodis]

Never seen my cash either lol. But the buzz for it was huge. That was the first things I've heard: that I'll get paid for surfing, and that my GeoCities site can be bought out for millions if I get visitors, so I put a counter on it and kept refreshing so my visitors grew lol.

Then again, it was the dot com boom, I had a chance lol.

People are saying 2006-2007 were the good days for domaining. No. THAT was the good days ok, lol. Imagine how much the people made that ran the paid to surf programs. There were like no quality scores and click fraud measures at that time, and there were more investors than people that ran websites.

 

[HWW]

I'm glad they are gone - most of the time when I find my original content has been stolen it shows up on a free geocities site - and yahoo takes forever to remove the content

 

[Damion]

I'm not sad at all, it opens up opportunities.
Get your link building hats on and benefit from this piece of Internet history going down the drain to build your own future.