The network of hosted websites known as GeoCities is fading fast.
As of Thursday, all three major search engines apparently removed the domain from their search index. Asite:geocities.com search on Google, Yahoo, and Bing shows that geocities.com missing:
Yahoo announced a while back that the free web hosting service that it bought in 1999 would be closing.
Google deleted GeoCities from its index first, according to a Tweet from. Andrew Shotland. On Friday, a Google spokesperson spoke out about the decision to move fast:
“After geocities.com shut down, these pages were effectively broken and giving a poor user experience. We took action to ensure that users wouldn’t land on the broken GeoCities pages and not find the information they were looking for.”
Yahoo had also removed geocities.com by Friday morning, and Bing was right behind them followed by Ask.com and AOL. However, some urls still show as active, and the websites are merrily chugging away:
According to Yahoo:
If you upgraded to Web Hosting before GeoCities closed, you were able to redirect your GeoCities web address to send your visitors to your new address on the Web, a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) that you selected when you signed up for your new plan. This redirect will remain available as long as you keep your Web Hosting site.
Please note that you must have upgraded before October 26 to redirect your GeoCities web address to a Web Hosting account.
Yahoo! GeoCities Plus customers: Although GeoCities has closed, your friends and family can still view your web site as usual. However, you can no longer access your files or update your pages with GeoCities tools. To update your site, you’ll need to upgrade to Yahoo! Web Hosting.
The site above has been confirmed by Yahoo as still online because it’s a GeoCities Plus account. Yahoo also states:
…Yahoo! GeoCities Plus customers can still upgrade to our premium Yahoo! Web Hosting service at no extra charge for five years.
If you’re a Yahoo! GeoCities Plus customer, your friends and family can still view your web site as usual. However, you can no longer access your files or update your pages with GeoCities tools. To update your site, you’ll need to upgrade to Web Hosting.
To get started, visit geocities.yahoo.com. (If you haven’t signed in to Yahoo! yet, click the sign in now link near the bottom of the page to do so.)
As a GeoCities Plus customer, you’ll see a special upgrade page that includes instructions to transition your service to Web Hosting.
Upgrading is easy and takes just a few minutes. When you upgrade, we’ll redirect your GeoCities web address to your new domain automatically.
Tags: GeoCities, web hosting, Yahoo