In case you have not heard, Rupert Murdoch, Big Man in charge of News Corp., has been quoted saying he “may block search engines from indexing our content”. During a recent interview he abruptly made this announcement to the astonishment and head scratching of many news desks.
Consider what this would mean if Murdoch carried this out, after all robots.txt is just a click away. Hypothetically you would no longer be able to locate any content from the Wall Street Journal or New York Post or MySpace content on Google. Unless of course you live in a world of scraped and plagiarized content, which last time I checked we do.
If Murdoch did decide to block all content, he risks that content just being found on sketchy ‘less reputable sites’ through search crawling. In reality illegal scraping will continue and search engines may struggle to know the difference. They will still crawl the scraped content, without ever knowing that the content is News Corp. property.
At least with with News Corp.’s content indexed correctly in the search engines, the engines will be able to rank the quality original content higher in the search results forcing the scraped versions to drop down below the fold.
Google has reported that its news indexing provides over 100,000 clicks per minute to all the various news organizations contributing content. That’s 6 million clicks per hour and nearly 150 million clicks in a day.
Whats Google’s take on this? “If publishers want their content removed from Google News specifically all they need to do is tell us.”
To put it simply, Google is ok with Murdoch’s haired brained scheme. Go ahead pull out.
News Corp. is the one will lose that battle. According to some recent news from Hitwise.
- Google and Google news are the top traffic sources for WSJ.com content with for over 25% of WSJ.com’s traffic.
- Over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are “new” users that have not visited the domain within the last 30 days.
- Twitter and Facebook sent only 4% of all US visits to News sites during October 2009.
This one will be interesting to watch. Will Murdoch really shoot himself in the foot? If News Corp.- owned publications are removed, the clear winners will be other similar sites that were once competing with Murdoch for that lions share of news traffic. Go ahead give it away to the competition, Brilliant!!!
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