So, the ‘to index or not to index’ battle has made its way to the desk of Lord Lucas. Rupert Murdoch’s portrayal of search engines as dark horses of the apocalypse may have been dealt a blow when the Tory peer tabled an amendment to the Digital Economy Bill outlining “Protection of search engines from liability for copyright infringement(292)”.
In layman terms; the amendment gives search engines immunity from copyright infringement to index and copy some of the content of publicly available websites, as long as the copy is used to link back to said website and only if the website carries no form of explicit request not to be indexed i.e. a robots.txt file.
Should the bill be passed next Tuesday, it might just settle once and for all Murdoch’s grumble with the search engines, in his case with Google in particular.
With around 90% of people beginning their online journey via a search engine (and around 80% of the UK choosing Google), you have to wonder how people would find content on news sites in the first place.
In my opinion, using a robots.txt file and banning Google from indexing content is not the way forward for Murdoch. He has to realise that Google has the search market cornered and that there are better, more viable options for guarding your content whist maintaining FREE traffic to your site.
Option 1
Create an iPhone app, the Guardian did and it’s making them money already. Sky News has one but it’s free (miss a trick there Rupert?)
Option 2
Only make the first part of your article publicly available – that way, you can still optimise a large part of your content, build links etc to gain listing in the search engines but have the full article behind a private, subcription log-in. This option would also allow you to sell highly targeted premium ad space.
I could think of a few more but I think you get the point. What irks me about Rupert Murdoch’s argument is that he seems so ill prepared on the subject. Maybe if he took some advice or listened to a digital specialist he never would have started the whole debate in the first place.
All eyes on next Tuesday.
Emma
It’s an interesting development but couple of observations:
1. It makes no difference to Murdoch’s paywall plans because newspaper owners are still permitted to block spiders (e.g. robots.txt, ACAP).
2. The proposed legislation only refers to usage by search engines, inferring that it will not apply to content aggregators. Unlikely, therefore, to have any bearing on the ongoing NLA/Meltwater case http://bit.ly/7rXw5o
Interesting piece of research supporting Murdoch’s hunch that search engines are profiting from newspaper content. http://bit.ly/7OjTpi It’s hard to believe that many users don’t read the article, though.