The popular free web hosting site GeoCities will close later this year. Yahoo announced that no new accounts will be accepted, in other words your SOL.

This move is just another way to drive visitors to purchase hosting from Yahoo as designed. The GeoCities homepage spells that out very clear. When you visit the help center you find a Q&A that explains the following.

Does Yahoo! offer another free hosting service?

No, Yahoo! does not offer another free hosting service. Instead we recommend our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service, which includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more. Learn more or sign up.

Another marketing move by Yahoo that will back fire!

It gets even worse:

According to Yahoo – “Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.”

Many users worked hard on maintaining their web pages and building loyalty. All that history and all those visitors and all those backlinks are gone!