I just have to say that Sept 19th is national talk like a pirate day… so spread the word.
Has anybody read about this yet? It seems some belgium news sites are mad at google for sending them traffic. The uproar is about what’s called “deep linking”.. that is, linking to a particular page of a website instead of it’s homepage.
While there’s always been controvery about this, it’s frankly a very moronic stance to take. Sure it causes users to bypass some parts of your site (including ads), but deep linking sends highly targeted users to the parts of websites that they’re most interested in. Other companies spend a combined 3-5 billion / year paying SEO companies to do this for the yet the newspaper sites try to fight it when somebody sends them traffic for free.
If you don’t want somebody to link to something, you have alternatives to prevent it. You can not put it online in the first place, write some mod_security rules, or get clever with your .htaccess file. If you don’t want search engines to cache your site (as is the case here) then it’s up to you, the site owner, to say so in both your meta tags and your robots.txt file.
It’s cases like this that re-affirm neither the courts, nor the newspaper industry understand just what the internet is or even what search engines are for that matter. Maybe they’re still upset that their Sunday editions won’t fit through the standard internet tube. Senator Stevens, I’d like to hear your input on this.