So what can SEOs and site owners learn from the events surrounding Geocities? Well, if you're just starting to learn how to build a web site, or you're doing it as a hobby, it's not a bad thing to get some space on a larger site and practice. But you must remember that if you do so, you are at the mercy of the owners. Just because it's there today, and has even been there for the last fifteen years, does not mean it will be there tomorrow.
SEO Chat forum member EGOL said it best. Upon hearing about Yahoo closing Geocities, he noted that AOL closed their "Hometown" last year. “Lots of people lost the URLs of great sites with no opportunity to redirect,” he observed. “This was a lesson to many of them not to build valuable property on a domain that they do not own.”
If you must get free or inexpensive hosting, at least make a point of owning your own domain. If you hope or plan to do anything significant with your web site, you should own your own domain. By “significant” I mean use it to sell anything, perform SEO on it, run a site with a content-based business model, you name it. Domain names are truly not that expensive these days, and once you own the domain you don't absolutely have to buy hosting until you're ready to put something up (you may end up with a “parked page;” whether that's acceptable to you is your call).
Another lesson we can learn is the importance of keeping up with new technology, and being aware of your competition. It may not have seemed obvious that dating sites such as OKCupid or professional networking sites such as LinkedIn competed with Geocities, but they all seek a very precious commodity: time and attention from web users. You must hold your users' interest, and offer them services they want that they can't easily get elsewhere. Otherwise, you'll find that loyalty is also an all-too-rare commodity.
One other lesson we can learn from Geocities: take your web site's structure into careful consideration. I don't just mean all the bad examples of Geocities web sites; I mean the structure of Geocities itself, and the odd way it was designed. Yes, it scaled, but the structure created by its founders was beginning to strain after only four years. Try to build enough flexibility into your site to cover where you plan to go.
Geocities may be disappearing, and many Netizens may say we'll be none the poorer. But it's still the end of an era. Here's hoping we'll be ready for the next one.
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