Some newspaper publishers—read Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—think it makes sense to pull their content from Google in the name of subscription revenue. Now Google is updating a policy so these publishers can have their subscription gates and maintain some search juice.
Consider it an olive branch of sorts so newspapers don’t have to find out the hard way whether their traffic will plunge.
In a blog post, Google argues that publishers can have it both ways.
As newspapers consider charging for access to their online content, some publishers have asked: Should we put up pay walls or keep our articles in Google News and Google Search? In fact, they can do both - the two aren’t mutually exclusive. There are a few ways we work with publishers to make their subscription content discoverable. Today we’re updating one of them, so we thought it would be a good time to remind publishers about some of their options.
The biggest item here is a program called First Click Free. Publishers have the option to limit the users who can access content without registering or subscribing. Google will also index and treat preview pages as free. The benefit is that publishers can use Google to generate subscriptions.
Overall, publishers have options that they probably neglected to realize they had in the first place—just like they threaten to pull content from Google’s indexes as if they never had the option.
Related: The Big Question podcast: Will News Corp. really pull its content from Google?
