Yahoo Terminating Geocities
The Geocities era ends today with the termination of the once popular free web hosting service. Some great programs and free websites where hosted over the years at Geocities which will no longer be available after today. This has several implications not only for users who hosted their contents at Geocities but also webmasters and users who linked to Geocities. Webmasters for one should make sure to update their links so that they are not pointing to Geocities anymore as these links will be broken after today. This is bad for visitors visiting the website but also for the website itself as to many broken links are not seen favorable by most search engines.
Geocities users can still use the day to backup their files from the web hosting service before these get deleted. Yahoo is suggesting to move to Yahoo web hosting but there are other free options available which might appeal more to Geocities users.
If you search for Geocities in major search engines you still find millions of websites and files that are hosted at the free web hosting service. It will be interesting to see how the search engines cope with the sudden termination of those pages and files.
Here at Ghacks we had ten pages with links to Geocities. Some to great software programs such as Iso Puzzle which will from today on only be available on third party download portals.
What's your opinion on the termination of the Geocities service? Good move by Yahoo to get rid of another slow and ad infected free web hosting service or bad move as some treasures of the past decade will be lost in the process?
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The missing files I mentioned in my prior post are now restored! Glad in the midst of my grouse I put in a good word for the Yahoo help desk folks. They were professional throughout; and victorious in the end it seems.
Now I’ve at last graduated to my own domain name.
Cheers to all.
WARNING!
Last night (10/27) I purchased a web domain through Geocites/Yahoo. The automated file transfer Yahoo faciliated from my old Geocities site to the new domain name did not go well. At this point all 500 of my web files are missing.
Given the 3 years’ worth of e-mail dropped from my Yahoo account 10 years ago, I’m not optimistic of the outcome. According to the Geocities support team’s log, I followed all transfer steps correctly. From conversations I’ve had, I’m coming to hear my situation with respect to the geocities shutdown and new domain transfer is not unique.
The good news is: Yahoo has a pretty good help desk procedure – e-mail them with your phone number and within about 1/2 hour they call back. Just the same, I’m sleepless and vexed. A lot of my life was on their servers.
Geocities was the first place I created my website and although I do not use it anymore it is had to believe that it’s gone. Yahoo managed Geocities terribly while Google’s blogger is booming. Wish Yahoo had managed Geocities better.
as a history buff my only hope is that in some dark corner of the internet some remnant of Geo Cities will remain. For many years, for many people, Geocities was the first taste of the internet and web pages. While most of it was ugly crap, it’s still important, it’s like that picture of the first time you rode your bike. Sure you’ve got a segway now and haven’t rode a bike in 15 years, but one day you may wish to look back upon what once was.
Some great dead dude once said, if we forget the past we are bound to repeat it…. please don’t make us repeat geocities!
Back in the previous millenium it was fun learning to walk the HTML walk with Geocities.
There were some cool sites hosted there back then before the DMCA nonsense started.
But i haven’t seen any useful stuff for many years on Geocities, mostly abandoned, disfunctional garbage.
I’m puzzled how you could assemble even 10 links to GC these days …