Well, today is the day that the music died. Yahoo is shutting down Geocities. 2009 is turning out to be a big year for Yahoo. There was the announcement that Geocities would close. Then there was the Yahoo/MSN merger, where Yahoo announced that MSN would provide the natural search results for Yahoo at some point in the near future. Then Yahoo announced they were going to discontinue the Yahoo Paid Inclusion Program (Yahoo SSP). And today is the day that Yahoo will official shut down Geocities. It honestly feels like a piece of my childhood is dying. My first website was on Geocities. Awwwww….how cute.
In January of 1999, Yahoo purchased Geocities for $3.57 billion in stock. They spent $3.57 billion for an asset, and now it’s closing 10 years later. Sheesh. Do you think they made their money back? Ugh. What a downer.
BTW, anyone have any idea how DMOZ is going to react to this news? They are going to have a tough time removing/redirecting all those Geocities listings in the DMOZ directory.
The DMOZ crawling bot named “Robozilla” scans the directory for broken links and websites that have errors or expired.
When these problems have been detected by “Robozilla”, it changes the status of the troubled listings to the “unrevieved queue”. Thus the links are no longer active on the public directory keeping it nice and fresh.
This will create a huge influx of websites to be put back into the editors queue. Everyone knows it takes for ever to get your site listed in Dmoz but this will make it impossible.
The vast majority of Dmoz editors have either quit years ago when the directory lost popularity, only ever became an editor to get their own sites listed or are dodgy and using their DMOZ editor status to make loads of money from people willing to pay for a fast listing.
DMOZ have to either lighten up and accept a lot more editorial requests or let the directory listings get old and stale, either way it will be obsolete soon IMO.