Yahoo!’s shutting down of geocities made news for the past couple of months. Even thought the sweet memories of starting our very first pages in geocities will be lurking around for a long time, I think we are not going to miss geocities much. Yahoo! may have their own reasons# to close geocities, but I think all in all it was good that geocities got shut down.
If you think about it, geocities did not matter any more.
The traffic to geocities was declining very rapidly in the last few years. Very rarely did the old geocities pages get featured in the search engine results. I don’t remember getting a geocities page as a result for any of my google searches (May be my queries are too much specialized and are biased).
I would argue that geocites did not have much quality content. Most of the pages in geocities were personal pages which were “under construction” for eternity. Newer users never signed up for geocities. Social networking was in and creating personal pages was out and users flocked to Facebook and the like. If anyone wanted to create pages so badly, they usually started a blog in Blogger or WordPress. After Yahoo!’s announcement of a probable closure of geocities, much of the quality data was moved by the users to other sites. All this meant that the pages in geocities no longer mattered. It was just the junk of the internet that ought to be cleaned out.
The biggest impact the closure of geocities will have on the web is on the search engine results. Even though the pages from geocities were not prominently featured in the search results, they always polluted the long tail results. (38 million pages do carry a very long tail with it). Most biggies in the search engine business have removed geocities from their index. There is another big aftereffect to this. The search engine rankings of other websites will be affected. You see, this 38 million web pages of geocities had lots and lots of outbound links. Remember that these links are old and do carry significant weight. If these links are removed from the PageRank calculations, the search results will not be the same. I hope that the search results will improve at least a little bit.
By the way if you were sleeping for the past few months and missed the party, and if you really want to get some of your pages back from geocities, you can try to get the data back from the Reocities project or from the Internet Archive.
#Every reason is economic. Isn’t it?
Google sites at http://sites.google.com seems like a better alternative to geocities. It is very easy for a layperson to create a website using it.
Man I remember the good ole bloody lines and danging girl .gif’s that were all over certain geocities sites. Those were the good ole days! *cries* Yeah…not gonna miss my old sites either. Yay for wordpress and learning how to do my own stuff!