Yahoo! acquired Geocities in January 1999 and, after operating the service for more than 10 years, they are finally shutting it down today.
Geocities hosts around 7+ million public web pages and 8+ million images according to Google. This number can be much higher because some of the Geocities sites could be private and therefore Google won’t know have details about such pages.
Starting today, Yahoo! will remove each and every Geocities hosted page from the Internet and that means introducing a few hundred million broken links, if not more, on the Internet. Let’s see how how quickly search engines manage to remove this “404″ clutter from their results.
Related: How to Recover Deleted Web Pages
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/broken-links-on-the-internet/10789/
Reader Comments
Bye bye geocities!!!
Written by Vijay on 10.26.09
maybe they won’t show a 404. I bet they are gonna redirect it to their web hosting package site.
Written by Ngan on 10.26.09
Its really a sad thing.Even I hosted my first web page in Geocities :(
Written by Gagsy on 10.26.09
Apparently this service has not been profitable except giving spam hijack articles for auto-blogging.
Great they are filing another one!
Written by gofree on 10.27.09