orr’s Comments

• Nov 25th, 2009 @ 2:13pm

  A few suggestions - Let's try it and see

  on If Google Visitors Are Worthless, It's Only Because Newspaper Execs Don't Know What They're Doing
  I think papers are well aware of the value of getting google traffic. I bet most of them employ SEO people to get better placement in Google. So why the complaints? Because Google has money, so why not grab for some?
  
  I have a few suggestions I wish I could see in real-life
  1. Papers who think Google is stealing from them, or sending
  them worthless bums - why don't they simply prevent their
  pages from being indexed? They don't need anyone's
  permission, and hey- we stopped the theft, and kept out
  the bums. Hurray for us.
  2. I wonder what would happen if Google "By Mistake" has
  a glitch that either cause content from a specific
  newspaper from to not show up at all, or not be a link
  - just the text, and users can go to the original if
  they want by directly pointing the browser there.
  I bet the affected paper will very quickly ask Google to
  fix the bug, and fast.
  3. I wonder what would happen if Google were to tell each
  paper "if you want to be included, you have to pay us"
  and it can either be a symbolic sum, just to establish
  who is providing value to whom, or a symbolic value
  per click-through from Google to the content site.