Murdoch: We'll probably remove our sites from Google's index
Rupert Murdoch has suggested that News Corporation is likely to make its content unfindable to users on Google when it launches its paid content strategy . — When Murdoch and other senior News Corp lieutenants …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the sharpest move yet in a year-long standoff between Rupert Murdoch and Google. Murdoch declared in May 2009 that the free-web news era was over and committed News Corp to charging for content online, a plan Google's own chief executive publicly questioned in September. Meanwhile the company's biggest Google relationship — the advertising deal underpinning MySpace — was already set to wind down in 2010, so Murdoch has been losing his main financial tie to the search giant all year.
The new twist is method, not motive: rather than just putting up paywalls and letting Google crawl around them, Murdoch suggested News Corp may deliberately remove its sites from Google's index entirely. paidContent's same-day video treatment flagged scepticism about how far this would actually go ('not so fast'), and the remark remains a suggestion rather than a confirmed decision — consistent with Murdoch floating options ahead of the paid-content launch.
First-order effects
- If executed, News Corp's newspaper sites lose their Google-referral traffic at the moment paywalls launch — trading reach for the assumption that readers will come direct or pay.
- Google loses a prominent, brand-name publisher from its news results, handing its critics a visible example of search coverage gaps.
Second-order effects
- Other paywall-bound publishers watch the experiment as a live test of whether de-indexing drives subscriptions or just erodes audience; whichever way it breaks sets the template they copy or avoid.
- Competing search and aggregation services gain an opening to court News Corp content on licensed terms, turning indexing itself into something publishers negotiate rather than concede by default.
Third-order effects
- De-listing reframes the crawler index as negotiable infrastructure: if a major publisher can withhold content from search without collapsing, the industry moves toward explicit licensing deals between publishers and platforms instead of implicit crawling rights.
- The pattern points toward platform-publisher bargaining becoming routine — with regulators eventually drawn into defining what fair compensation for indexed news looks like.
The trend: Publishers are shifting from accepting free search distribution to treating their content's findability as leverage in negotiations with platforms.