Murdoch seems hell bent on punishing Google for all the free content they’ve ‘robbed’ from him, so much so he’s willing to get into bed with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer. Ergh.
A few weeks ago TechCrunch revealed that Microsoft and Murdoch held meetings to discuss the potential of giving top publications premium positions in Bing and removing their online editions from appearing in Google’s SERPs.
The News Corp megalomaniac is willing to put up firewalls and stop Google’s spiders from crawling his publications’ websites, including the Financial Times, The Sun and The Times, and have Microsoft pay vast amounts of money in order to have exclusive rights to crawling and returning these sites in their Bing results.
So any publisher that wants to participate in this sort of strategy must make themselve’s invisible to all search engines not taking part. But what implications will this have on the advertising market? And more importantly for us, what does it mean for search marketers? If this deal goes ahead we will have to optimise for Bing far more, and those of us who have publisher clients are going to need extensive knowledge of their algorithm and what the search engine takes into account when ranking websites.
Of course Microsoft are feverishly keen for this partnership to solidify as they need a USP to distinguish Bing from Google, because lets face it, anything Bing can find Google can find better. However Rupe isn’t fully convinced that balding Ballmer even has the money to make up for the loss of traffic that Google’s rankings generate for the newspapers.
When asked about the deal with Microsoft, Murdoch replied: “I don’t know if they can afford to do that. If they were to pay everybody for everything they took, from every newspaper in the world and every magazine they wouldn’t have any profits left.”
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