Ten years since they paid far too much for it, Yahoo! has pulled Geocities this week.

What does that mean for SEOs? Mostly, it means there are TONNES of links waiting to be picked up. 850 million, in fact, says a group called Majestic SEO.

Here’s the concept: thousands of these Geocities pages have been taken down. The site you made at 12 with Michael Jackson midi files and Simpsons gifs: gone!

That leaves a whole lot of webmasters with links pointing to dead Geocities pages. Get those links.

Find those Geocities links!

Other sites have recommended searching like this to find links to these Geocities sites:

“linkdomain:geocities.com your-keyword“

I’ve found that this pulls up a lot of crap, plus a lot of discussion about the technique itself.

Far more rewarding, in my opinion, is to search like this:

“site:geocities.com inurl: your-keyword“

You’ll then find the Geocities pages themselves (get used to seeing Yahoo’s holding page!), from where you can use Yahoo! Site Explorer to find links pointing to these pages.

Yes, it’s a longer process, but you’ll find old Geocities pages with your keyword in their URL, and then quality links pointing to the pages.

Pick up those Geocities links!

When you’ve found these external links, contact the webmaster with a request such as this:

“Hey there, I noticed you’re linking to [old geocities site], perhaps you might like to update your link to this site.

As you can see, there’s relevant content to your niche … “

Simple as that!

The best part is, while you’re trawling all these old sites you’ll often come across some juicy guestbooks and opportunities to add your URL to small directories. Both aren’t the best practices, but remember: these are most likely old domains and very relevant to your niche.

Good luck! I’m off to pick up some myself…