Danny Sullivan over on Daggle.com writes a good, long post on the old media dogs’ whining and bitching about those evil search engines and all the unwanted traffic they bring.
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 St. Journal at all.
Oh, but you won’t do that. You want the traffic, but you also want to be like the AP and hope you can scare Google into paying you. Maybe that will work. Or maybe you’ll be like all those Belgian papers that tried the same thing and watched their traffic sadly dry up.
Yes, that would be very sad, wouldn’t it?