Rupert Murdoch to Use Robot.txt to Block Google

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Posted in » News, Search Engines - by Ades on November 16th, 2009

rupert_murdoch.jpgRupert Murdoch the founder and CEO of the world’s second largest media conglomerate News Corp. has said in his latest interview with Sky News that they will be blocking Google from indexing their sites.

This he said will be their strategic move to increase the profitability of their online versions of their newspapers. Somehow he believes that Google is doing more harm by sending tons of traffic to their websites because he thinks that it’s better to have small number of people who pay (paid subscribers) rather than tons of people who do not pay and read his (News Corp) news from Google News for free (even if Google provides a link back).

News Corp. own tons of newspapers, magazines, tv and radio stations worldwide. Newspapers like The Sun (UK), The New York Times (US), and The Wall Street Journal (US) are owned by News Corp. (full list here)

That’s an interesting strategy indeed. He is the only person I heard on internet who doesn’t want traffic and Google’s indexing of his sites :) Normally everyone is after traffic and always trying to improve their SEO to better rank in major Search Engines.

I personally think this strategy of R.Murdoch will do more harm to his websites’ profitability if he indeed will block all search engines from indexing his sites. Sure, he might have loyal customers who will read WSJ and New York times everyday, but any product and website needs advertising. And free advertising like what Google is doing for them is the best thing that any website can get. He only needs to tweak the website to make it free section and paid section. Perhaps free section could only have some brief news and full articles could be accessed only by paid members etc.

Bad for Google?

In his private mailing list, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo suggested that, this move by News Corp might be bad for Google and good for Google’s competitors. Because he believes, now is the time for Bing and Yahoo to approach News Corp directly and be the exclusive provider of News Corp’s news on their search engines. Obviously this would affect Google’s reach and Google’s competitors could effectively snatch some Search Engine Share from Google. (read his article here).

What is your opinion on this issue? Do you think R.Murdoch is doing a right move by blocking Search Engines? Do you think his move is a loss for Google? (R.Murdoch’s interview on YouTube after the jump)

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21 Responses to “Rupert Murdoch to Use Robot.txt to Block Google”

  1. By libhomo on Nov 16, 2009

    This is wonderful news. It would be so great to be able to go to Google News and not have it clogged up with Murdoch’s sleazy propaganda.

  2. By Legitimate work at home jobs on Nov 16, 2009

    I really surprised listening that he block google for crawling his web pages, afterall mots of traffic come from google.

    Might be he want to do something special by doing this.

  3. By The Guru on Nov 16, 2009

    Any site would do anything to get traffic from Google. I read before that those news publication doesn’t like Google because they have Google News :D

  4. By Ngan on Nov 16, 2009

    Blocking Google is not a good idea, his vision is stucked in the 70’s. His move to buy MySpace is a bad idea, and this whole blocking Google thing will eventually seal his fate as the man that doesn’t not know what the internet is all about.

  5. By Seattle Heating Cooling on Nov 17, 2009

    I used to work in the newspaper industry and can say from experience that, good or bad, the internet is killing them. In the early ’90’s when newspapers all started giving their news away for free online, no one could understand how or why. Execs hoped that by doing that, it would increase subscribers in the long run….it didn’t. Maybe Murdoch is desperate, but seriously, how can a newspaper survive with the internet practically replacing them. I think it’s a good business move if other papers follow suit, otherwise it’s suicide.

  6. By Minnesota Attorney on Nov 17, 2009

    Murdoch is a smart guy, but this is not a smart move. It’s moves like this that raise the question of whether big corporate America understands the value of SEO.

  7. By avaya ip office on Nov 17, 2009

    That’s strange, i guess they really only want to give their content to exclusive users. It will be interesting to see how this turns out for them.
    -Jack

  8. By Dee @ get your ex girlfriend back on Nov 17, 2009

    Woww. im kinda shocked he said he would not let google crawl his sites. I think that it is crazy..GOOGLE is the biggest of then all forever.

  9. By wiah on Nov 17, 2009

    i’m not really care about how bad of google. Google is just another tools to me.

  10. By used tires on Nov 17, 2009

    Personally I would not do what he will do with the robots txt but hey.. that just means there’s is more room for the rest of us =D

    Till then,

    Jean

  11. By Get 3 Quotes | 3Q on Nov 17, 2009

    Mr Murdoch doesn’t want to give anything away for free….in the internet world this is tantamount to online suicide. Unfortunately he is trying to flog life back into an archaic business model that doesn’t apply in the internet realm. Good luck to him….hahahahah

  12. By living room furniture on Nov 17, 2009

    This is intriguing. Google is the biggest player on the internet today and now this company will play the game with them. This is amazing, I wonder how will they make it.

  13. By Apple iPhone Accessories on Nov 18, 2009

    I think it’s quite a bad thing. Surely these guys will lose on traffic, and Google on good relevant articles? I suppose we’ll see what happens soon…

  14. By fences on Nov 19, 2009

    I just could not imagine this working out well for News Corp. Not at all.

  15. By Marketing Man on Nov 19, 2009

    They won’t implement this policy for too long. Maybe just long enough to finally kill off their obsolete business model. Newspapers are not a good line of business to be in these days.

  16. By Marketing Man on Nov 21, 2009

    I just read an interesting article on this very issue. Apparently twitter users are overwhelmingly pointing out to Rupert Murdoch that his model will not work. I can see twitter being huge in polls and similar public opinion gauging type market research and experiments in future.

  17. By Gouri on Nov 29, 2009

    Sounds interesting. Really a courageous step by Rupert. Hope, it breaks the autocracy of Google & its PageRank.

    I faintly remember reading somewhere that ebay had tried this but then Google indexed its pages in spite of that breaking all barriers of ethics… saying that indexing or not indexing of pages is at the sole discretion of the search engine..

  18. By mini laptop on Dec 1, 2009

    This really surprised me. I am sorry I don’t get this. Is having less paid subscribers, good than non paid free surfers? Won’t they run advertisement to earn back the revenue. I see ads allover the news website to cover their. Anyways this is an interesting and different move. We will have to wait and see if Rupert reverses this action.

  19. By Laptop Briefcases on Dec 4, 2009

    Wow that is a shocking move. I couldn’t see how this could possibly make them more profitable. If Google is going to send you a ton of traffic, you just nod your head and say thanks. It is up to your website to figure out a way to profit from that traffic. You don’t just shut out that traffic if you don’t know how to properly handle it.

  20. By ferforje on Dec 14, 2009

    i m not sure that he knows what the google is.
    that s the worst soluttion i ve ever heard.

  21. By PS3 on Dec 23, 2009

    I don’t think this is a way out. Google will lose its users.


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