Search Engine Watch > SEO > Google Makes it Easy for Rupert Murdoch to “De-Index” from News Search

Google Makes it Easy for Rupert Murdoch to "De-Index" from News Search

Google is attempting to appease paid content providers with a couple of new updates to news search features.

First up, they’ve added restrictions to the First Click Free program. This has allowed publishers of paid content sites to let users gain access to an article without shelling out a dime. Google is only allowing users 5 free accesses per day. Previously, it was easy to game the system and access a bunch of pages on a site without paying. (Call me crazy, but individual organizations don’t own the news. Can’t access something on Wall Street Journal? Fine, I’ll visit some other financial news site.)

Next, Google has released a new user agent for News Search. This is useful if you want to “de-index” (yeah, we’re looking at you, Rupert) from News Search but still be included in Google’s main search – or vice versa. Simply include a few lines in your robots.txt file and you, too, can get less traffic to your site.

To allow Google, but block Google News:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

To allow Google News, but block Google main:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:

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