Link Building: Anybody else think the end of Geosites is a good thing?

All those 1997 links gone

[surfgatinho]

Whilst researching a few of the dinosaurs in my niche I constantly find high PR, really old links from Geosites (amongst other prehistoric free hosting providers)

I'm not sure how much weight these carry with Google, but I personally am looking forward to seeing them removed from the equation.

[willybfriendly]

There was a lot of unique and valuable content on geocities, that will be missed. I am reminded of a collection of essays contrasting the views of Thomas Jefferson and Ayn Rand that was a real jewel. In fact, if I had a site related to that subject I would surely have linked to those pages.

Loss of links from geocities will be a mixed blessing.

On a related note, how long before these sites drop out of DMOZ. What effect might that have if some cats shrink in size?

[martinibuster]

Anybody else think the end of Geosites is a good thing?

Anybody know why? I'm neutral about it. It may hurt and help competitors and our own sites in equal measure so it all evens out. Even if a Geocities site never linked to us, it might be linking to someone who is linking to our site, thus reducing the power of your inbound links. So I'm neutral.

[rise2it]

"There was a lot of unique and valuable content on geocities, that will be missed."

Agreed. In the early days (you know, the 90's), a lot of individuals built sites with USEFUL information (not as a disguise to make money) on just about any topic you can think of...hobbies, etc.

The information was real, unlike 99% of the sites that has been created since then.

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:52 am (utc) on Nov. 9, 2009]

[martinibuster]

This discussion is about the effects of Geocities closure on links. :) There's a general discussion ongoing about the Geocities closure here [webmasterworld.com].

[Rosalind]

In terms of link building, I think it's a good thing for anyone with a current, regularly updated website that continues to attract links. Basically there were probably a lot of stale links on there, linking out to a lot of other stale websites. So there will be a trickle effect, as other parts of the 90s web lose ranking and drop from the indexes.

It's probably bad news for anyone who makes money from domain parking, or who otherwise benefits from legacy links to content that has since changed considerably.