Are there any advantages in SEO and PR if you host your site in a free hosting provider such as Geocities? Do you get some of the PR from geocities.com ? How about the SEO, since it's hooked to the domain (lets say geocities.com) will it get indexed quicker? Thanks.
There is no advantage to using a free hosting provider like Geocities (other than you save a few cents). Sub-domains are treated as a different domain so no PR will pass and since it isn't linked to the root domain, it won't get indexed any faster.
Thanks. What exactly is a subdomain? Isn't it http://sub.geocities.com. But what about the page urls suck as http://www.geocities.com/sub/index.html which looks like a page belonging to geocities..
It could actually be a disadvantage because people generally don't like linking to free hosted sites. Pop-ups and other ads are things that turn people off.
Generally speaking, any free hosting got disadvantage. A unique domain itself is one SEO factor especially with keywords. As for being indexed quicker with geocities in Yahoo!, I am not too sure about that. In a way, it makes sense because Geocities belongs to Yahoo!, but I don't know how helpful it is. In a similar way, probably some think blogger is better to get indexed at Google or even ranked high at SERPs, but I don't think there is advantage.