Has News Corp gone from Google?

Where has News Corp gone?

Despite Google seemingly appeasing Rupert Murdoch by limiting the number of accesses to News Corp sites to five clicks per user each day, it would appear that he has acted on his threat of removing his sites from Google's News pages.

Whilst many thought that Murdoch's threat was a bluff, Trend Visualizor is reporting that the total number of News Corp pages (such as MySpace, IGN, RottenTomatoes etc) has dropped from 192 million to 12 million. Although all Google web sites still indicate that e.g. MySpace has 179 million pages in the index, the Google Search API is currently returning another number for that: only 7 million.

Despite this, News Corp news sites such as The Sun are still appearing on Google News listings, so how have News Corp figures dropped so dramatically?

Myspace: from 179 million to 7 million
RottenTomatoes: from 4 million to 100,000
IGN: from 4million to 300,000
Stats.com: from 2.4million to 50,000
News.com.au: from 1.2million to 70,000
Sky.com: from 1.4million to 85,000

The Next Web blog have theorised that News Corp hasn't used blocking agents to prevent Google accessing the site, but robots.txt files (files that instruct Google what pages not to index show nothing). The question is how have they managed this or has this been arranged with Google?

Whilst this may not be the best news for Google, losing such a wealth of news sites, it will be excellent news for smaller news sites and bloggers who will more than happy to embrace the extra traffic if News Corp don't want it.

Relevant articles:

Is Google appeasing Murdoch? | Online payment: To pay or not to pay? | Murdoch to block stories on Google news?

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