media
nov 16
2009

De-Indexing Google Redux

Arrington weighs in on this whole FoxCorp/Google de-indexing thing. I still think this is going to play out in some interesting way: I predict someone big will attempt to treat their spiderability as an asset in the coming year. Google won't pay at first, but once Bing takes a bid for exclusive rights, it's a whole new game. (And to that "value of traffic" argument from the previous post, I still can only say: 1 billion unmonetized pageviews versus 10 million actual dollars isn't a contest right now. Many companies will try to take that Bloomberg strategy of making their content exclusive in the coming year. I'm not saying it's necessarily the right strategy, but I'm sure it will happen.)

4 comments

You kinda pooh-pooh'd it last week, but I'm down with the doom 'n' gloom crowd that thinks that if this were to actually start happening, when a critical mass of folks was reached, the only obvious end result would be that robots.txt simply gets ignored. I hope we never get there.

posted by CRZ at 2:41 PM on November 16, 2009

If a site were excluded, I'm sure someone COULD make a fair use case too, but I don't think that will happen. I think it would just be horrible PR.

posted by Rex at 2:47 PM on November 16, 2009

robots.txt can never be ignored i hope we do never get there

posted by vic at 3:21 PM on November 17, 2009

People have to remember exactly what being at the top of the search market game actually means. The most commonly searched word on Yahoo is overwhelmingly "Google."

Unless they were being paid very handsomely for it, I can't imagine it would be worth it for Fox to decrease their traffic by at least 40%. But let's say that does happen and Bing does pay handsomely - does that also correlate with a algorithmic boost that automatically promotes Fox content?

The only people who would benefit from Fox-heavy search results probably already have Fox as their startup page. It's a balancing act that doesn't really seem all that beneficial to either party.

posted by Carlos at 12:13 PM on November 19, 2009




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