Dear Rupert,
I hear you want to prevent search engines from indexing News Corp sites such as the the Wall Street Journal, NY Post, Fox News and various Sky affiliates.
This is easy. Create a .txt document with the following:
# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Then upload the file to the root directory of any site you want to block search engines from.
Easy, isn’t it?
Let’s do it for Fox News now. Just create the document and place it here: foxnews.com/robots.txt
With those simple lines, you protect your valuable content, and the rest of us are granted a slight reprieve from the data stream that is daily content.
You won’t have to worry about us, and we won’t have to worry about you.
Say, for example, I’m trying to figure out how Barack Obama hit the bogeymen trifecta of being a simultaneous Nazi, Fascist and Communist.
You will now no longer need to worry that I can access the deep reporting on this subject that your various news organizations have conducted.
Instead, only those who specifically seek out your Web sites, and pay your subscription fees, will have access to the proprietary reporting you’ve conducted on such matters.
This is an awesome strategical undertaking. I applaud your advisers for advocating such a strategy. And, of course, I applaud your understanding of how the Web works in accepting their suggestions.
Once you upload this simple file, it will be like neither of us actually exists.
Win-win all around.
For more info, see robotstxt.org.
If you need help implementing this measure, feel free to get in touch.
I’m sure we can work out a mutually beneficial arrangement to make this happen.
As said, win-win all around.
Yours,
Michael
UPDATE
Confused?: Michael Wolff has a primer over at Newser about how Murdoch intends to block Google from indexing his news sites. By extension, we assume this means all search engines and aggregators.
Give it a read. A nice observation:
As of a year ago, Murdoch had never used Google—never once, by himself, run an Internet search—and so it might be reasonable to assume he doesn’t know what’s involved here.
It is quite possible he doesn’t realize—and can’t fathom—that removing News Corp.’s newspapers from Google means that, in the largest part of the information market, they would cease to count, cease to be a factor, that their absence would not register as a hole
UPDATE II
Slate’s Jack Schafer gives a deeper look at Murdoch’s motivation:
If it were in News Corp.’s economic interests to dig an Internet moat around its newspaper properties, Murdoch would have already done it rather than talk about it. Instead, he’s shouting about it to signal to his competitors 1) where he’d like to take News Corp. and 2) his desperate desire for them to follow. And they must follow, because if they don’t, the genocidal tyrant’s general-interest newspapers—the Australian, the Times, the New York Post, the Sun, News of the World, and others—will be doomed to irrelevance.
