Dear Belgian News People and Lawmonsters,
You might be surprised to know that it is extremely easy to prevent Google from indexing and caching your website. All you need to do is to add a tiny text file robots.txt containing the following lines in your root directory:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
If this file is in place, I can guarantee to you that your precious copyrighted content will never show up in Google index or Google news. Just to be safe, please feel free to add the following meta tags to the header of each page on your website:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
It is your right not to be indexed or cached by google, and there have always been technical way of preventing this from happening. Google even provides webmasters with an immediate response take down application that can be used to remove sensitive or copyrighted information from their index.
Personally I think that proactively adding two lines of text to a single file on your server is a much more convenient method of protecting your copyright than drafting a scary court order requiring google to take down your content. Unless, of course, the real motive behind the order was extortion
Either way, I hope you will enjoy a huge dip in traffic, and advertising revenue resulting from the forced removal of your sites from Google index. Good luck staying in business. You will surely need it.
[tags]belgium, google, belgium news, indexing, caching, googlebot[/tags]
Even i knew about the robots.txt file and i agree good luck staying in business, rofl!! Thanks fer the laugh!
Dear Poster
You might be surprised to know that Belgium has a fairly complex political structure. Also, three languages (Dutch (Flemish), French and German) are spoken.
The court order was drafted by French and German speaking newspapers. The ‘Newscritters’ didn’t want Google to cache articles they had already deleted and to cache articles which are only meant for paying visitors.
While you are correct that this problem could easily be solved by adding a couple of lines, and that this court order is indeed not a smart move, it is worth mentioning that dutch-speaking newspapers have no quarrel with Google. As you can read here (in Dutch) or here (in French) or here (in English).
Kind regards, I hope this clarifies some things without upsetting anyone ;)
Sorry, I didn’t specify that the post was mainly directed at French and German speaking newscritters :)
Thanks for the link. Form reading the article it looks like their motive is in fact extortion. They want to be indexed by Google news. They just want Google to pay them for every indexed article.
Oh well, this will be a good example of how copyright idiocy hurts internet media business. Without the steady stream of referrals from Google their revenue will drop down drastically. Ironically, the referral stream was probably what prompted the managerial types to do this in the first place.