Rupert Murdoch doesn’t want his sites to be listed in search engines anymore

Jennifer McClelland | RSS | Mon, Nov 09 2009 | 1 Comment

In a act only a crazy, but extremely wealthy, old man would decide to use, Rupert Murdoch has announced that he wants to make his websites invisible to Google’s search engine.

Why would anyone want to do that? After all, if someone has never discovered the site, the best way to obtain that reader is through a search engine. Well, he doesn’t see it that way. He said, “If they’re just search people, they don’t suddenly become loyal readers.”

However, in my opinion, having someone be able to find your site through search is the best way to GET new readers and if someone is reading your site that’s better than them not reading your site, right? Plus, how is someone going to become a loyal reader if they don’t know about the site? I always thought the best way that sites become popular is because they are able to be searched for.

I have a list of websites I read everyday; many of them are websites I searched for.

Murdoch is also planning on doing something that has really failed to “take off” in the past; he wants to put his news sites behind a “subscription wall.” His reasoning behind this move is that websites as well as blogs don’t earn “serious money.” He currently has this in place at the Wall Street Journal; at the site you can read the first couple of paragraphs of an article but if you want to read more, you have to be a subscriber. Typically, the same article or something with similar content can be found by searching through Google or some other search engine for free.

He did say that he feels that the same “search engine people” are the ones who “steal” stories from his sites. He said, “they just take them.”

This man really underestimates the power of Google and other search engines. I also think that he is too stubborn to realize when he’s made a mistake. What I mean by that is when his plan fails to work, he won’t go back to the way things were. He will keep his “news” sites subscription based where very few people will read it and the sites will quickly fall in every ranking.

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Tags: rupert murdoch, other search engine, wall street journal