Danny Sullivan on Google and the Newspaper Industry

Great piece by Danny Sullivan on newspaper executives’ ill-considered decision to blame Google for their problems:

I’m going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with two simple lines. Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Done. Do that, you’re outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall Street Journal at all.

Oh, but you won’t do that.

★ Thursday, 9 April 2009