Will Companies Opt Out of Google Index?

Will Companies Opt Out of Google Index?
by Andrew Grinaker, VP of Business Development/Strategy

Within the last week, Rupert Murdoch has shaken up the search industry by proclaiming that he will contemplate "removing our sites from Google's index." Murdoch and his company News Corp have long criticized search engines for piggybacking on their content for free. He also claims in this article that "readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers."

The search engines, including Google, have responded by telling News Corp and other newspaper sites to learn more about the indexing procedures and/or simply turn the index mechanism off.

To circle back on Murdoch's comments, he is stating that he would block entire sites of information to Google's index including the Wall Street Journal and other popular news syndication within News Corp.

In this article on Calacanis.com, Jason Calacanis states that Microsoft and Bing should develop a simple strategy to offer more revenue to providers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, in attempt to have them remove themselves from the Google index.

In my opinion, News Corp and Murdoch are just making claims and I would be wholeheartedly surprised if they actually removed themselves from the index. Sure, there may be issues with the content aggregators but one look at his traffic sources would tell him that Google is referencing 4 to 8x the amount of traffic than any other source. Removing that would be irresponsible for overall traffic numbers and impressions that he could be selling in their advertising network.