Can You Think Of A Good Reason To Ban The Search Engines?
Rupert Murdoch, the grand maestro behind News Corp is reported to have floated the idea of banning search engines from indexing content from newspapers. The idea, of course, is to only have paid subscribers reading the content. I’ll come back to this specific issue in a moment.
What are your thoughts? Can you think of any good reason to ban the search engines. I don’t know if I can, realistically. It can be done and done fairly easily. A simple command in the robots.txt file will do the trick and for large companies, they have the legal brains on their staff to tackle any search engine that doesn’t follow the robots.txt instructions.
Back to News Corps’ approach. Not having a newspaper background means I look at the issues a little differently. If you check out any of the online media outlets that do have paid subscriptions, you will notice one common element – they still try to look like a traditional newspaper.
To take it a step further, if you find something of interest in the search results that happens to be on one of these sites, you are taken to a page that looks like a newspaper – instead of the article, you only see a snippet with a phrase such as ‘you need to be a subscriber to access this article‘.
If we stop thinking like newspaper owners and start thinking like web owners, we can start to see the problems. Being found in the search results is what everyone wants. Getting that click through is the name of the game. If you are looking to gain subscribers then rather than arriving at a lame newspaper page – the searcher should be arriving at a landing page that provides that snippet but then promotes the subscription service.
If you think like an online owner, then you are thinking subscription, subscription, subscription. How can I win that subscription? And so your page is designed around winning that subscription rather than preventing someone reading the article.
Perhaps if News Corp stopped thinking in newspaper terms and started thinking in online marketing terms, they would be able to embrace the millions of free visitors they get through the search engines each month. Hey, they may even start to make a profit!
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