Yahoo! acquired Geocities in January 1999 and, after operating the service for more than 10 years, they are finally shutting it down today.
Geocities hosts around 7+ million public web pages and 8+ million images according to Google. This number can be much higher because some of the Geocities sites could be private and therefore Google won’t know have details about such pages.
Starting today, Yahoo! will remove each and every Geocities hosted page from the Internet and that means introducing a few hundred million broken links, if not more, on the Internet. Let’s see how how quickly search engines manage to remove this “404″ clutter from their results.
See the Yahoo Geocities Letter
