Geocities Termination Will Improved Search Ranking

RIP GeoCities - was a trending topic on Twitter where all Twitter users bid farewell to GeoCities. The personal Web-hosting site, launched in 1995 and owned by Yahoo Inc. since 1999, was to be shut down by Tuesday. For Yahoo!, this adds on to the fact that the Search Engine Giant is losing its grip on the Internet, after it has also previously shut down ventures, such as Yahoo! Pets and Yahoo! Live.

It's a move that will scrub from the Web a significant, albeit dated, piece of Internet history and the pages where millions first tried their hands at coding and designing. It will also improve your site search ranking whereby non-active pages from Geocities will be purged. Read also Geocities No More (an announcement made back in April 2009).

GeoCities, in its heyday, was an online hub for Internet communities, connecting related pages through "web rings" that predated the massive footprints of MySpace and Facebook by nearly a decade.

For some, creating guest books, visitor counters and streaming HTML marquee tags on GeoCities was a stepping-off point into a new digital age.

As the Web evolved, visits to the largely stagnant GeoCities declined sharply and had continued to fall in the months since April, when Yahoo announced the site would be closed.

In September, GeoCities pages had about 10.3 million unique users, according to analysts comScore Inc. That was a 16 percent drop from the 12.1 million they'd seen just a year earlier.

GeoCities was the third most-visited site on the Web in December 1998, behind AOL and Yahoo!, with 19 million unique visitors, according to a CNNMoney report.