Yahoo didn’t exactly make a big deal out of the fact that it is cancelling everyone’s Geocities account, which is unfortunate for everyone with a museum of animated GIFs, multicolored text on a black background, and broken image links. Considering that Yahoo bought Geocities for 2.8 billion dollars, they probably did not want to admit that their purchase turned into something of a white elephant. From an SEO perspective, there is the potential for a seismic shift in how SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) are presented when all of these homemade sites vanish from the fabric of the internet, and all their links go the same way.

If you look at a list of some of the worst Geocities sites and have your Google Toolbar running, you may notice that several of these sites have pretty good PageRank. On the whole, there are quite a few Geocities sites with a PR of 3, 4, and 5, many of which power other sites by way of links. Even though many Geocities sites were last updated sometime in 2001, their links (and their age) have been giving a boost to any site that has been in continuous operation since then.

Here are some of the things that could be significantly affected by the sudden loss of an old, trusted batch of links:

• Legacy Sites and 301s – Many of today’s big players are getting their link popularity from old links and older legacy sites that have been 301 redirected into the main site. If these sites are getting any Geocities links, then their collective link power will shrink. For instance, in the Golden Age of Geocities, Network Solutions was about the only provider of domain names, so every old (or non-updated) site that referenced buying domain names would be linking to Network Solutions as the recognized source. It will be interesting to see how their authority as a registrar changes without references from Geocities.

• Sites That Link To Your Site – If you’re like most SEOs in the world today, you got your links either by buying them, convincing other site owners to link to you, or submitting yourself to directories. No matter what your link building strategy, one or more of your link sources could be affected by a loss of direct or indirect links.

• PageRank – Believe it or not, PageRank is sometimes the only measurement that SEO company customers and their executives care about. Even if all your rankings are moving upward, there are still people with the mindset that if your PR went from a 6 to a 5, then something must have gone wrong, despite the fact that you can’t control the value of the sites linking to yours. Given the universe of Geocities sites passing PR to “the links that link to you,” there may be a wholesale adjustment in this “metric.” On the other hand, if the whole PageRank cosmos shrinks at the same time, PR could be largely unaffected, since the relative value of all sites on the internet has deflated at the same time. For people who have done most of their link building in the last few years, they could see rankings go up if their links aren’t wholly derived from older sites. In this case, the “new growth” sites would see improved PR while “old growth” sites lose relevance. Naturally, people who sell text links based on PR are going to have their hands full.

• DMOZ – If you have a DMOZ link, and they link to Geocities site in your category, and if DMOZ eliminates dead links periodically, then your DMOZ link should be more valuable given the reduction of outbound links on the page. Then again, DMOZ is not exactly known for fast editing or being up to date, but DMOZ itself may feel the pinch of losing lots of links from Geocities as well, and pass the downgrade on to you.

• Broken Links – Consider the number of sites that linked to Geocities resources over the past 15 years. Now consider that every one of these sites needs to remove a broken link. If they remove the Geocities link, the on-site factor (freshness) changes and outbound link profile changes. If they don’t remove the link, there is a broken link which may affect how the individual page gets ranked in Google, unless Google has not factored “pages with broken outbound links” into their algorithm.

So then, what will happen when the big day arrives? Will Google have a fix in place so it knows not to spider all Geocities pages, or will it keep sending out spiders over several weeks to “discover” that the cached page is now gone? This is an important question, because the timing of everything else depends on whether rankings shifts are gradual or sudden. Given that the PageRank bar is updated on an irregular basis, this may be the only place where everything changes at the same time.

The real question, however, is whether some of the most tenacious established sites on the SERPS are going to hold their positions. Given that some people never really had to “do” SEO to get their rankings and hold them, they may be rudely awakened to the fact that their top spots were built on links from sites that no longer exist.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.