The Financial Times reported today that Microsoft is offering to pay News Corp to remove its content from Google’s search engine. This has become Microsoft’s preferred marketing approach: pay people to use your stuff… or, in this case, to not use someone else’s. We saw it with Bing Shopping’s double cashback earlier this year, and we’re seeing it again now.
That’s what a $25 billion war chest lets you do.
News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, has been taking his own hard line against Google, stating that he would use legal methods to stop Google from “stealing stories” from News Corp properties such as The Wall Street Journal. The puzzling thing with this approach is that no one is forcing publishers to have their content indexed by Google. It’s really quite simple: put a robots.txt file on your site, and– bam! –Google will no longer index your content.
Of course, you’d also be committing digital seppuku in the process, as Google probably drives the majority of your traffic, but hey.
via FT.com / Media – Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact.
