You know, I looked down upon Geocities websites even back in 1995.  So why did I Geocities website in March, and then list (yeah potential criminals, I may have all of some of them left) my guns for sale to pay for a Tripod website just this week?
Tripod and Geocities are two long-time providers of free websites to people.  In exchange for free websites, these companies put their own ads on the pages.  That, along with the longer URLs are the main reasons I didn’t like websites that used them.

But back then, you couldn’t buy a domain name for $8.95 (or less) like you can nowadays.  So there were some good sites created using these companies, and those sites got links to them.  Because there were relatively fewer websites out there, and people were generally more inclined to link to other sites than they do today, some of these sites got a lot of links.

But what’s happened since then?  The search engines have placed importance on the amount of links that a website has to it in determining relevance, so websites that have many links to them generally come up higher in the search engine results.  Also, some search engines, like Google, place some importance on the amount of time that a website has existed.

But you know what, I’ve run across many of these Geocities or Tripod sites that haven’t been maintained for years.  But they’ve come up as the #1 or #2 position on some important keywords.  Since the sites weren’t maintained, wouldn’t you assume the owner has either forgotten about it but doesn’t care about it?

That’s what I did.  I decided to find some of the popular Tripod or Geocities accounts that had high search engine position but seemed to be neglected.  Then I’d write the owner and ask if they would be willing to sell the website.

But who to choose?  How could I find Geocities or Tripod sites that had high search engine position for their keywords without randomly choosing keywords?  Well, Google itself was the answer.  If you search for the words “golf ball”, Google is going to show you what it considers the most important websites that talk about golf balls.

So all I had to do was search the word “geocities” or “tripod”.  Then, Google will tell me the sites that it thinks are the most important that contain these words.  Obviously, the first ones will be the companies themselves.  But after about page 3, you start to see free geocities sites that are deemed to be relatively important by Google.

Some of these websites have those old hit counters at the bottom, some of which are hyperlinked to sites like sitemeter.com.  The Tripod site that I just bought had a sitemeter icon which let me see the traffic for the last year.  The site received nearly 10,000 unique visits per month.  The site is very extensive covering a niche topic of a certain type of tool repair.  It had unique and interesting content, photos, over 500 people had signed the guest book saying “This site is just what I was looking for, it answered all my questions.”

There had been over 720,000 page views since 2001. 

When the current site owner emailed me back saying he’d accept an offer, I offered him amount, he countered, I accepted, then he gave me the username and password, with which I was able to change all of the account information, including passwords.

As for the Tripod and Geocities ads?  Both companies now offer to remove the ads for $5 amonth.