Andrew Commander

GeoCities closing down is a DUMB move by Yahoo!

3 Written by Andrew Commander on July 24, 2009 – 1:05 pm

A guest post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, driving calls for local professional service firms.

Too bad Yahoo! is closing GeoCities– makes about as much sense as a bum throwing away his last dollar. Yahoo! bought GeoCities for $2.87 billion years back– that’s billion with a B.

Certainly, we can understand that Yahoo! needs to focus, as detailed in the Peanut Butter Manifesto, written by one fed-up Yahoo! exec three years ago– read the Wall Street Journal leak here. But cutting off your toes as part of an extreme weight loss plan is not the right answer. A fat company needs to exercise, not torture itself or cut off body parts.

For those who do SEO for a living, or folks who are old enough to even still have GeoCities accounts, you know that you don’t just kill pages that are well-aged (started in 1994, which is 15 years ago), have great unique content, and have generated a zillion backlinks. Kill those pages and “poof”– all that link juice disappears!

Not to mention all the people you’re going to piss off. But if you’re going to sell to Microsoft, let them hold the bag, and then parachute out with a fat paycheck– it’s a pretty good move. Not for Yahoo!, but for the folks running the show. Much easier to just sell than actually have to turn the company around– which at this point is a foregone conclusion anyway.

I don’t work at Yahoo! anymore, but were it me, I’d salvage some value– to sell that part of the business, just like Yahoo! Personals and the rumored sale of HotJobs and Yahoo! Small Business. But now the vultures are coming in to scavenge– just look at the ads that show when you search for “geocities”, ready to take on these unhappy customers:

But they’re not customers, you argue– since they’re not paying for hosting. In that case, show some ads– you’ll still make a killing.

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