How to Find Sites That Link To geocities Sites

There are a number of free and paid backlink services that will produce a list of links pointing to a particular domain, you might want to try those. I imagine getting the 'full' list would cost a high 3/low 4 figure sum mind you.

I think the caveat (in regards to geocities anyway) is that a lot of sites on there were made years ago, and likely not maintained, which in-turn may be the case of the people that linked to the sites.

As for other domains, any that contain a year < 2011 might be a good shout. There are plenty domains with savvy setups that get a lot of the decent domains mind you.

I think the caveat (in regards to geocities anyway) is that a lot of sites on there were made years ago, and likely not maintained, which in-turn may be the case of the people that linked to the sites.

yes, that does seem to be a problem. Quite a few sites that were last updated 8 to 10 years ago. Is there a way to do a google query that will find sites that have been updated since, say, 2009?

As for other domains, any that contain a year < 2011 might be a good shout. There are plenty domains with savvy setups that get a lot of the decent domains mind you.

Can you elaborate on that? I am not sure I understand you.

Essentially you're looking for expired domains, anything with a year in it will more likely have expired (in most general terms), e.g. the london olympics 2012 will have a number of domains hyping up the event for next year but by 2015 I imagine a lot of them will be up for grabs.

Bankrupt 'free' web hosts would be another one to consider, whether they use subdomains or subfolders.

In the specific case of geocities: Is it even worth it? If geocities links are still present, it means that either nobody has bothered to click on the link since late 2009 and then tell the webmaster they've got a bad link, or that the webmaster in question isn't actively maintaining their site so they haven't bothered to update links. Either way, seems like the time needed to investigate and act would far outweigh the value of the link.

@ lucy24:

In the specific case of geocities: Is it even worth it?

That seems to be the $64,000 question.

Right now, I am kind of running out of potential sites to link to me.

I had originally thought to get links from the same places where my top competitors were getting links from. Then I realized those links were primarily spam links, so I quickly stopped that.

I can get links from some .edu sites, but I will be waiting until the fall to start emailing the professors. I have already gotten more "I Am Out Of The Office Until September" auto response emails than I would care for.

The real benefit of those sites that link OUT to geocities sites is that they are generally quite clean. They are usually focused on a single topic and the sites are so "amateurish" that it would be hard to imagine that they were engaged in link selling. Seriously, I think that the webmasters were too busy trying to make their sites look as ugly as possible to engage in any linking shenanigans.

And the other benefit is that the INBOUND links to those sites are natural, aged links.

If worse comes to worst, I guess I can always do what martinibuster suggested to me in another thread, and that is to contact the webmaster and see if I can buy the site.