What removal from Google could mean for your news site

Thinking about removing your content from Google?

Press Gazette’s Wire blog has reported on a story in the Telegraph giving tips on how to survive your website no longer being indexed by the search engine.

The advice comes from Neil Boom, PR Director of technology company KTS who own Onepagenews.com - a website that The Wire suggests may be seen as a rival to the web giant’s own news service - which was quietly dropped from indexing by Google.

According to the Telegraph, the move by the site saw Onepagenews’ traffic tumble from around 18,000 per day to around a paltry 700 (aspiring Murdochs may wish to pay attention to that particular statistic).

The company was then forced to set about rebuilding its online presence whilst investigating why Onepagenews was suddenly absent from Google.

Boom’s tips include setting up news alerts and stories by email functionality and making registration as simple as possible, also flagging up the extra benefits for readers who register.

"Focus on events under your own control. We looked at content, distribution, added value features and site promotion," he says.

And, he adds, don't panic.

Has Google caved to pressure from Murdoch?

Google have announced that newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through their site, reports the BBC.

This action follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.

Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites.

Users would now start to see a registration page if they click on more than five articles in a day.

"Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free," Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen said in a blog post.

"Now, we've updated the programme so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing."

The BBC describes how Rupert Murdoch had earlier accused firms such as Google of profiting from journalism by generating advertising revenue by linking readers to newspaper articles.

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones told the website that the concession was relatively minor but Mr Murdoch might see it as vindication of his decision to take on Google.

Cohen also stated in his blog post how, besides First Click Free, Google would also offer publishers the option where they would index and treat as “free” any preview pages that were made available to them – generally the headline and first few paragraphs.

He said that because the content would be identical to what a normal user would see, this would not breach Google’s strict “no cloaking” policy – where the page that a web crawler sees and indexes is different to the one seen by the end user.