Today a friend of mine made me aware of Yahoos choice on dropping Geocities. This is one good reason to why you should not trust third parties, but more on this in another entry. Since it’s hardwired into me to think about how to benefit from everything I took a few minutes today to thing about how you can benefit from Geocities.
How to benefit
I did a quick search and found out that there are currently estimated to be over 23 000 000 Geocities-pages indexed by Google. I have no references to back up this, but I would say about 90 percent of the information currently on Geocities will be lost, since Yahoo will not take a backup.
If you do not download your files and images before October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to access that data. After October 26, your GeoCities files will be deleted from our servers, and will not be recoverable. If you’d like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you’ve posted online, you need to act now.
As you can see, this will result in millions of pages disappearing from internet and search engines. Since there are no backup on most of the information you can simply copy a whole web site, create a WordPress site and start to republish all the information all over again (niche site).
There might be a small chance of the author finding your site, but if you ask politely for permission or ask him to continue to update it while you pay for domain and host, I’m sure he will not mind.
How to find good content
Since I believe you should keep your niche sites within the same niche I recommend you to use Google and search for a specific niche.
keyword site:geocities.com
By doing this you will get all the content related to your niche, ordered after how Google values it. Remember there are other factors as well when it comes to ranking high on search engines, but it is a good start.
Ethics
The main question is, should you do it? The content is written by someone else and by law you have no permission to republish it. With that said, most of the content will be gone forever and you might see it as an obligation to make it available to future generations. What are your take on it?
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I think it is a great idea but only if you get permission first!
Wow, great info. I am looking into the geocities now. But that is really a big thing.
Hi Stefan,
Thanks for sharing the unbelievable news about Yahoo.
It seems that Yahoo is shutting many more projects like Yahoo360,Geocities etc.
Anyways,thanks again for opening the door for free content.
the idea is quite good.you can copy the free content and i dont think there will be duplicate content issue.geocities has been around for such a long time.i created few pages there myself.
Since all the content will be removed this is not a problem. The only thing you need to worry about is the ethics.
Stefan, you have a great idea there but be careful because it would still be classified as copyright infringement.
Also archive.org should have an archived version of most of these sites so they won’t actually be gone forever. Nothing on the internet is every truly gone forever.
Well, you are partly right. I have created a lot of sites during the years which are gone now. Most of them are not even on archive.org. According to Yahoo archive.org will not save all of it. But you are right, this could be classified as copyright infringement.
If we adopt content from geocities, Did Search Engine crawl them is duplicate content ? Nice tips, can adopt to my blog.
Since the content will be deleted from Geocities you have nothing to worry about when it comes to duplicate content. If anything, search engines might think you moved your own content.
Thanks for the info..Looking now on Geocities. Spin the articles or rewrite them or place a source to make it legit.