How will Geocitis closing affect the internet

[Blue Cat Buxton]

I know it is not like wikipedia closing, but there must be loads of established sites on geocities, passing on old established links and PR into the wider internet that will all dissapear when the site is closed later this month.

Probably anyone serious about web publishing will have migrated their sites a long time ago, but could there be a page rank drop generally as thousands of pages are lost to the internet?

[Mr. Pink]

As far as I understand SEO Google always liked amateur sites, because those sites were just built by enthusiasts with information to share, usually never trying to sell anything. Some of the sites on geocities have a high PR, for that reason, as well as because the are old sites (and age cannot be fake with Google).

I would imagine that any sites that gained most of their PR from geocities sites will experience a drop in PR when this goes down. But the sites that have many links form other sites will probably not be affected too much.

I didn't know geocities was closing. This kind of sucks, but I guess it's always a possibility with all these free services. So, one day Blogger may also decide to shut down and all these blogs will be lost.

[Chris]

PR being a relative thing it is hard to say how it will drop, the linking circles are complex.

However, globally available PR is a function of total webpages in Google's index, in an inverse relationship, so the reduction should result in higher PR globally, even if you have no links from geocities.

[Blue Cat Buxton]

PR being a relative thing it is hard to say how it will drop, the linking circles are complex.

However, globally available PR is a function of total webpages in Google's index, in an inverse relationship, so the reduction should result in higher PR globally, even if you have no links from geocities.

So the older and larger the internet gets and the more pages in the index, PR will get lower and lower?

[Westech]

I'm shocked that they're doing this. They basically have a bunch of free very well indexed content that they can stick Adsense (or YPN or whatever) around. Only Yahoo could manage to lose money on this.

[Chris]

So the older and larger the internet gets and the more pages in the index, PR will get lower and lower?
Global PR is constant, so yes, as the number of people sharing the pizza grows, the share of each slice will lessen. It is all relative.

That being said, Google will of course probably adjust their scale at times for their toolbar, and we'll never know the actual numbers, and since such things affect everyone your relative rankings will not change, but mathematically, yes, it happens. Large index = lower average PR.

Quite a few years back when Google still did monthly updates they had a huge one that like doubled the size of their index, it was no coincidence that almost all sites had a toolbar pr decrease at the same time.

[KLB]

Quite a few years back when Google still did monthly updates they had a huge one that like doubled the size of their index, it was no coincidence that almost all sites had a toolbar pr decrease at the same time.
I was totally bummed by that incident. I had just reached a PR7 on one of my pages on the previous update and then the PR shift knocked me back down to PR6. :bawling: