Yahoo's Geocities Shuts From 26th October

[engine]

As previously reported, Yahoo closes Geocities from today. To me, that sounds like the end of an era.

Earlier story

Geocities To Close [webmasterworld.com]

[johnnie]

Awww... Well, at least we still have good ol' fortunecity and tripod.

[creative craig]

It certainly is the end of an ear, shame to see it go - but I guess its the way of the world!

[nickreynolds]

Didn't know it still existed!

[brotherhood of LAN]

BBC news have a piece on it, titled "End of an era for early websites"

[GaryK]

If you're a fan of the xkcd web comic, and even if you're not, I suggest paying it a visit today. Russell has done a great job of memorializing GeoCities. Today's comic is quite funny too.

[carguy84]

LOL, Gary, it took me a minute to find the Geocities connection. I just immediately went to the comic and read it.

That is HILARIOUS. The HTML errors are internet classic.

[Silvery]

So, this segues into a question: what will become of all that Geocities PageRank once these sites go dark?

I could hope that it might all get redistributed to the rest of us, but I'm supposing some of it will get transferred back to wherever Yahoo! chooses to point the URLs, assuming they use a 301 redirect?

It'd be better if they'd let all those pages 404, if they're to disable them, since a redirect wouldn't point to new locations for the same content. And, Google ought to just redistribute the PR in that case...

[Angonasec]

Yahoo! bought Geocities for almost 4 billion US dollars claiming it was a good investment because it gave them access to 30 million US homes.

For the same money they could have purchased +the whole of the Swedish Volvo business+ building quality buses, lorries, and cars.

Volvo may have changes ownership, but I suspect their products are still rolling along just fine, and will be for decades to come.

[g1smd]

The link graph of the internet probably now looks like a nuke was dropped on it.

Unless these value of these links has been quietly filtered out over recent months, I guess there will be some unintended consequences from the closure in the near to middle future.

[Wlauzon]

I wonder how many of those geocities sites did not get the word and will be emailing a non-existent address to complain tomorrow :P

[BillyS]

What does Yahoo mean close? Everything is still there...

[zehrila]

Doing a site: command shows tons of geocities pages, is it like they ceased the new registrations and might be keeping the current pages?

[Dominic_X]

Yahoo Directory Fail: There are still a ton of listings in the Yahoo directory that are to Geocities pages. Will they ever clean out the geocities listings and all the gazillions of other broken links?

[creative craig]

Yahoo Directory Fail: There are still a ton of listings in the Yahoo directory that are to Geocities pages. Will they ever clean out the geocities listings and all the gazillions of other broken links?

I am sure when the time comes they could easily run a bot to remove all the Geocities links.

[Dominic_X]

They could start by running a bot to remove all the broken links the directory contains to many websites.

Have a look through a few categories, it's pathetic.

[creeking]

"End of an era for early websites"

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

"It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet."

[brotherhood of LAN]

Allowing the option of serving a custom HTTP response would be good, to redirect some of the content that is still alive today. Perhaps a choice of 301 and 410, gone [webmasterworld.com]?

[Silvery]

Wow! Millions of Geocities pages are now 301 redirecting or erroring out as 410s!

Here's the message appearing on Yahoo's error page:

Sorry, the GeoCities website you were trying to reach is no longer available.
GeoCities has closed, but Archive.org may have preserved the site you are looking for.
To find out, visit Archive.org and enter the site's web address in the field provided.

Anyone want to lay bets as to how long Google takes to drop all those pages?

[edited by: encyclo at 10:08 pm (utc) on Oct. 27, 2009]
[edit reason] fixed error-code typo [/edit]

[Staffa]

One of my sites (own domain, not Geocities) had a visitor tonight with the following referrer url :

[search.yahoo.com...]
http%3a%2f%2fwww.geocities.com%2felimar48%2ftutorials.html

I replaced the actual software name with software

Notice the 404s in the url

I broke the link

[Silvery]

Yeah, I know - the link might call itself a "404 handler" resource, but if you look at the actual server header returned, it's a 410. (I mistyped "401" earlier, as though I were dyslexic, when I'm not.)

Your visitor must've clicked on a link to your site from Yahoo's "related search results" they're showing on those pages.

[BillyS]

Should be interesting to see how fast they're de-indexed:

Google = 7,440,000
Yahoo = 35,489,569
Bing = 3,370,000

[hannamyluv]

I am finding that most geocities sites are down, but that some are still up. I am willing to bet that Y kept anything up that was still profitable.

[BillyS]

I guess it was interesting...

Google = 7,450,000
Yahoo = 811
Bing = 3,380,000

If we can believe what Y! tells us, they're de-indexing pretty quickly.

[martinibuster]

DMOZ has over 51,000 links to remove.
BOTW has over 7,000 links to remove.
The Yahoo directory looks like it has over 200,000 links to remove!

This looks like fun! :)

[BillyS]

More stuff....

Google = "did not match any documents"
Yahoo = 407
Bing = 3,390,000

Looks like Google wins... strange how Bing is increasing.

[martinibuster]

...strange how Bing is increasing.

Now that's what I call a deeeeep crawl. :o

[BillyS]

Day 4 of this experiment...

Google = "did not match any documents"
Yahoo = "No Pages"
Bing = 3,460,000

Yahoo and Google have cleaned things up. But for some reason Bing keeps growing (or not shrinking).

[minnapple]

so sad
I had several pr4/pr5 geo accounts that had .edu .gov inbounds links from ages ago.
bye geo . . . tear

[martinibuster]

BillyS, good stuff. :)

Here is more: Go to Google and type in:

[keyword] site:geocities.yahoo.com

The cache has the defunct geocities page. The link takes you to Yahoo's error page.