Due to the recent Newspaper Association of America’s (NAA) conference there has been a lot of media comments from various parties about how much of the traditional press want Google to pay for the content that they are using from their website.
This has come about partly because the Associated Press is suing to protect its content and with Rupert Murdoch asking if news aggregators such as Google should pay to “use” its content.
Now for the most part, most news aggregators, in my mind are helping to deliver visitors to these news websites, driving thousands if not millions of visitors and generating a lot of monies in advertising revenue.
At the end of the day, this is all about the bottom line. Newspapers feel that Google should be paying for the content that they get for free – content that is free for any user of the newspaper website.
As Danny Sullivan has recently said on his personal blog – if Newspapers no longer want Google to take content from their websites there is a very simple solution – add a robots.txt file with:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
That will block all search engines – if its only Google that they want to block, then they should use:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
It would be interesting for a major newspaper to try it, and see what they think about their reduced revenues from (Google AdSense) advertising – I suspect that they would swiftly be submitting a re-inclusion request to get that traffic that has been lost back, although this isn’t likely to be great for their SEO results in the long term to try it out.
Newspapers need to move with the times, and get themselves a better online presence – for me personally, I rarely read a newspaper these days, because they are looking at yesterdays news that I had read online.
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