Rupert Murdoch may be one of the most powerful men in the world when it comes to news publishing, but he’s proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that when it comes to the Internet he is but a ‘newb’.
Murdoch has long been outspoken over the evils of Google and the darn search engine’s insistence on ‘publishing’ content from NewsCorp websites both in the organic listings, and in Google News. Murdoch doesn’t like the fact that Google uses its content and offers it up for its billions (read that Rupert, BILLIONS) of daily users. No, Murdoch would rather Google left NewsCorp’s websites well alone, as I’m sure we all would.
No, hang on… Google sends most websites the lion share of their traffic (they certainly do for us at StuckOn and we can estimate they do for NewsCorp as well) so if NewsCorp manages to remove itself from Google’s index, how will anyone find it?
Actually, that doesn’t matter either because Murdoch also wants to charge users for reading the news on their websites… excuse me? Did we read that correctly?
Yes, he wants to charge users for reading news.
This brings about an interesting question; firstly, who would actually pay to read news content online when you can get it for free from unbiased websites such as the BBC, and secondly, without Google, who is actually going to find his websites in the first place?
According to recent figures, Google sends around 300 million visitors each month to newspaper websites. Who could afford to lose a slice of that action? What Murdoch proposes is so against the ethos of SEO we can’t even begin to understand what he is thinking, or how to illustrate just how wrong he is.
Removing your content from Google is akin to a bank robber sending his work schedule to the police at the start of each day, or a mouse walking into a cattery covered in cottage cheese. It’s suicide.
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[…] we first reported to you back on October 11th, Rupert Murdoch (the owner of News Corp) wants to ban Google from indexing the content on his websites because he doesn’t like the fact that his news content appears for free in Google […]
[…] obviously doesn’t understand the level of traffic that his websites, and indeed every other website on the Internet, receives from […]