Majestic SEO kindly reached out to us, correcting Yahoo's link data and showing off their own impressive backlink data power at the same time: the true number of backlinks to GeoCities is over 850 million.
Today, Yahoo closed GeoCities. A little bit of history, a little of culture disappeared <sniff>
And this is yet another event where SEO's separate themselves from normal people show their true, professional nature.
Where others see the web decreased by 7.5million web pages and 8 million images, we see…
31,500,000 850,000,000 Free Links
GeoCities started in 1995. That's when Microsoft released Windows '95 including this thing called Internet Explorer. Netscape was just 1 year old. The world was different, simpler almost. Except for publishing web sites that is.
In other words, GeoCities is ancient. In Internet years, GeoCities is 56 years.
In that time the millions of web sites and web pages hosted on GeoCities have acquired a shitload staggering amount of links. Over 31 million 850 million in fact.
Those links lead led to pages about just about everything and anything. People talked about their families and pets on GeoCities but also build resources about the Mic'maq, CGI freebies, or coffee. That and about a million other topics.
Mining 31,500,000 850 MILLION Free Links
Use Yahoo's linkdomain operator to find links pointing to Geocities. Add the keyword or topic you're targeting. This combination finds pages that and link to Geocities and have your keyword on their page.
When you find a prospect, politely contact the site owner to point out that Yahoo has closed GeoCities but that you may have an alternative resource available for them to link to.
Melanie Nathan has some excellent tips on how to approach site owners in Link Request Strategies for Blogs, Edu's & .Gov's: Respect My Authoritah!
It's a Wrap
- Yahoo takes Geocities offline
- …but thousands of links are still pointing to it
- …search the ones relevant to you
- …and suggest to repair their broken link by replacing it with yours
See also
- The Reciprocity Link Building Method by Melanie Nathan
- Link Building Strategies: 69 Solid Tactics For 2009 by Wiep
- What's A 404 To Do? by Rae Hoffman
And you? Do you plan to make use of GeoCities' disappearance? If not, why not?
Images by: vshioshvili and franganillo
About the Author: Ruud Hein
