For all of you who have been around the Internet for awhile, you may be surprised to learn that as part of a cost-cutting move, Yahoo is shutting down GeoCities (GC) by the end of the year according to an article at Search Engine News.
Yahoo’s actions should serve to remind site owners that hosting your site on another domain is an extremely bad idea.
Why? First, you don’t even own the site when it’s another domain and any links on your site benefit the host, not you. And if that company decides to shutdown, it can cause some serious problems for you.
The longer you wait to do it, the harder it will be to move your site from GC. First, search engine spiders will need to crawl your old site and find a redirect to the pages on your new site before the new site will be crawled. Understandably, this will take some time.
Register your own domain and get a real web hosting account, which isn’t very expensive. First, you will not be building someone else’s site AND you will not be at the mercy of another company’s financial problems.
Have a site hosted by GeoCities? Read the Yahoo Shutting Down GeoCities… article for a step-by-step approach to moving your site from GC and start taking control of your web property and let it benefit you.
