Should news sites, bloggers and other sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google pay for the privilege of including snippets and links to news stories? Also, should YouTube or sites that include embedded videos of movie/TV clips pay every time somebody views them?

Give us your thoughts on this important topic that goes to the heart of the internet in the comments below.

Weinstein said, “Journalists don’t benefit when their stories are taken, and given a link. It would be like me launching a newspaper–call it Link—where I can have the greatest journalists in the world working for me without paying them. It’s inconceivable. If BMI and ASCAP can monitor the music business, we need a BMI and an ASCAP to monitor these businesses. This will be the one legislation for our industry that I’ll press.”

This would be part of a broader law that where a monitoring organization would also monitor the web for video clips and require websites like YouTube to pay this organization a fee for each view of a clip of a movie or television show.

As the publisher of WebProNews and a long-time advocate of the right to link, in my opinion Weinstein’s idea would destroy the internet as we know it today. The internet is based on the idea of linking, that’s why it was originally referred to as the World Wide Web! If you make publications, blogs, Google, Twitter and Facebook pay for linking to a news story, how many of them would still do it. The answer is none.

Weinstein may think he’s only talking about making news linking giants like Google News pay, but laws against free linking could not just apply to them. His proposed legislation would also have to apply to Reddit, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter and news publishers and bloggers who routinely republish snippets of news articles with links to the original. Many of these sites also inbed video clips as well.

Weinstein challenges the assertion by publishers that linking and taking small snippets of articles is not stealing content but is actually promoting the content. Weinstein equates linking and publishing as one and the same. Weinstein also told Deadline, “When it comes to journalists and journalism, I’m with you. It is important they get paid for good work, and wrong that others just take it, with a link.”.

Since most articles have numerous social buttons encouraging “sharing” their articles via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, you would think it would be obvious to Weinstein that publishers and journalists want their stories to be linked to. The definition of going viral is mass sharing on social media sites which pushes huge numbers of people to a journalist article if he is so lucky. Linking drives traffic to an article which theoretically can then be monitized by the publisher. If the publisher doesn’t want the traffic he can put up a firewall login and charge visitors to read the sites content.

If a news site like Deadline doesn’t want its articles linked to then it shouldn’t publish them on a linking platform called the Web. Weinstein may be surprised to learn that Deadline and most news sites are quite happy that their articles get free traffic driven by links!

Just like the music industry, which has in the past sued the parents of kids who downloaded music without paying for it, Weinstein proposes that those linking to content should also have to pay up. He wants to do it a bit more tactifully than the RIAA, but still wants to collect nonetheless. His idea I presume is to first change the definition of fair use which is permitted per U.S. and many international copyright laws, where a website can take snippets of content and reuse it to a certain extent.

Theoretically, considering Weinstein’s personal connection with Obama, he could persuade the President to tighten this definition via some minor changes in regulations and rules and bypass Congress. The definition of fair use as written in U.S. copyright laws is vague and could easily be redefined via regulation. This is a scary proposition considering that linking and discussing news articles is integral to free speech.

Once fair use is redefined to allow copyright holders the ability to charge websites a retroactive fee for each time a visitor viewed a news summary and link, that’s when a new organization similar to BMI would emerge to ensure that journalists are paid for their work. BMI has people going into businesses, such as bars and restaurants, all around the country looking to see if music is being played without their license. When it catches a business playing unauthorized music it forces them to pay based on a variety of factors such as number of seats in a restaurant and number of songs played.

If a bar doesn’t join BMI and agree to pay a monthly fee up front, then often BMI will sue for huge amounts. For instance, one restaurant in North Carolina was order by a court to pay the BMI $30,450 for playing just four unauthorized songs.

This is what Weinstein wants for publishers and writers of news content! If you are a blogger that makes a small amount of money from ads and you include a snippet from a news article in your story you could be sued if you didn’t already agree to a monthly payment.

For Facebook, Google and Twitter the ramifications of this kind of heavy handed legislation could be huge. They are the YouTube of written content since so many of us share snippets and links via them. If sites like these need to license links with a BMI type organization, it’s likely that they would just eliminate news links and snippets altogether which would change the web forever… don’t you think?

Google agreed to create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google says it will also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.

Though Google has indicated that it hopes to reach similar agreements with publishers in other countries, it doesn’t look like those in Germany are going for it. Germany’s The Local reports that German newspapers have rejected the idea of copying the agreement Google made with French publishers:

The German association of newspaper publishers (BDZV) said the French agreement did have some positive points. The major of these was that it was established and accepted “that the aggregation of content from third parties as a business model costs them money,” said Anja Pasquay, BDZV spokeswoman on Sunday.

But she said a drawback was that the French solution only referred to Google. “The publishers there have no legal recourse against other aggregators who operate in the same fashion – or those who will do so in the future,” she said.

Back in December, Google made a deal with publishers in Belgium. While not exactly the same as the one it made in France, it seems that German publishers would take similar issue with such a deal.

Those questions are at the heart of a Australian case that just tipped against Google, and are likely at the heart of many cases to come. An Australian high court has found Google liable for libelous content tying a man to organized crime. Of course, Google didn’t create the article that made the references, it simply provided a link to it within its search results.

The man’s name is Milorad Trkulja, and he claimed that Google defamed him by associating his name and image with (untrue) claims of ties to organized crime, both in regular search results and in Google Image search. The jury in the case found Google guilty and therefore responsible for the content that they link to. They’ve been fined $200,000, but are in the process of appealing the ruling (as you would expect).

Is Google responsible for the content that is found using their search engine? Or is this a ridiculous claim to make? Let us know in the comments.

Here’s what the Judge in the case had to say:

The question of whether or not Google Inc was a publisher is a matter of mixed fact and law. In my view, it was open to the jury to find the facts in this proceeding in such a way as to entitle the jury to conclude that Google Inc was a publisher even before it had any notice from anybody acting on behalf of the plaintiff. The jury were entitled to conclude that Google Inc intended to publish the material that its automated systems produced, because that was what they were designed to do upon a search request being typed into one of Google Inc’s search products. In that sense, Google Inc is like the newsagent that sells a newspaper containing a defamatory article. While there might be no specific intention to publish defamatory material, there is a relevant intention by the newsagent to publish the newspaper for the purposes of the law of defamation.

Basically, Google may not want to publish it, but they are publishing the publishers. And since Google’s algorithms are tooled to find said content, they are responsible. Or at least it is plausible that a jury could see it that way. The Judge is clearly unconvinced that this stance is set in stone.

The Judge also differentiated search results pages from Google Image searches. The plaintiff also complained of images tying him to crime figures. The Judge notes that a Google Image search is a more-sophisticated version of cut-and-paste from magazines, and importantly a Google-created page:

As was pointed out by counsel for the plaintiff in his address to the jury, the first page of the images matter (containing the photographs I have referred to and each named “Michael Trkulja” and each with a caption “melbournecrime”) was a page not published by any person other than Google Inc. It was a page of Google Inc’s creation – put together as a result of the Google Inc search engine working as it was intended to work by those who wrote the relevant computer programs. It was a cut and paste creation (if somewhat more sophisticated than one involving cutting word or phrases from a newspaper and gluing them onto a piece of paper). If Google Inc’s submission was to be accepted then, while this page might on one view be the natural and probable consequence of the material published on the source page from which it is derived, there would be no actual original publisher of this page.

You can see just how much of a charlie-foxtrot this is. Which pages are Google’s creation, and which are simply the “consequence of the material published on the source page from which it is derived?”

The jury concluded that Google was a publisher, and was liable for the defamatory content even if they weren’t notified of it yet. Although Google contended that it doesn’t matter if they were notified of the content of not – they’re not responsible – the Judge rejected that notion as well.

It follows that, in my view, it was open to the jury to conclude that Google Inc was a publisher – even if it did not have notice of the content of the material about which complaint was made. Google Inc’s submission to the contrary must be rejected. However, Google Inc goes further and asserts that even with notice, it is not capable of being liable as a publisher “because no proper inference about Google Inc adopting or accepting responsibility complained of can ever be drawn from Google Inc’s conduct in operating a search engine”.

This submission must also be rejected. The question is whether, after relevant notice, the failure of an entity with the power to stop publication and which fails to stop publication after a reasonable time, is capable of leading to an inference that that entity consents to the publication. Such an inference is clearly capable of being drawn in the right circumstances (including the circumstances of this case). Further, if that inference is drawn then the trier of fact is entitled (but not bound) to conclude that the relevant entity is a publisher.[42] Google Inc’s submission on this issue must be rejected for a number of reasons, the least of which is that it understates the ways in which a person may be held liable as a publisher.

Of course, $200,000 to Google is basically nothing. The appeal really has nothing to do with the monetary damages. Google knows that this kind of decision sets an unsettling precedent for their future defenses in similar cases. Google as “automated news agent that’s responsible for what their algorithms pull out of the depths” is a view of Google that the company can’t afford to have stick.

We’ve seen this story play out numerous times over the past couple of years with Google’s autocomplete feature. In August of 2011, Google lost a case in Italy and was forced to remove autocomplete suggestion in its search box that tied a man to the word “truffatore,” meaning con man. A few month later, Google was fined $65,000 because one of its autocomplete suggestions labeled a French man “esroc,” meaning crook.

And this year, Google made an out-of-court settlement with French anti-discrimination groups over a “Jewish” autocomplete suggestion.

Google’s argument in these cases is similar to the argument in the Australian case. We’re not suggesting anything. We’re not defaming anyone. Google’s autocomplete suggestions are based on popularity of terms. That means that if anything, Google users are the ones linking people’s names with unsavory terms. Google’s search results are also based on an algorithm. Just ask Rick Santorum about how much responsibility Google claims in what people find using its search engine.

So, is Google a publisher? If not, what are they, exactly? How much responsibility do you think Google has for what people find using their search engine? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Of course, the note is in French, but Google has provided it in its entirety here. On the company’s European policy blog, Google’s Director of Public Policy in France, Oliver Esper, says, “The web has led to an explosion of content creation, by both professional and citizen journalists. So it’s not a secret that we think a law like the one proposed in France and Germany would be very damaging to the internet. We have said so publicly for three years.”

“In order to shed light on the reasons that lead us to believe that this law is detrimental to French users, innovation on the Internet and ultimately to the news publishers themselves, we decided to post the note in its entirety,” he says. “We have always been and remain committed to collaborate with French Publishers associations as they experiment and develop sustainable economic models on the Internet.”

Regarding Germany, we discussed the proposed law in that country and the larger ramifications of such a law here. Of course, Google has battled similar criticism and threats from publishers here in the U.S. and abroad.

AFP reports: “France’s new Socialist government, which is open to helping struggling media companies, warned Google that it should not threaten democratic governments.”

Google is also having some issues with publishers in Brazil. There, publishers have gone so far as to pull out of Google News altogether. It will be interesting to see how long that lasts.

The Knight Center for Journalism In The Americas (via PaidContent) reports that all of the 154 newspapers that belong to the National Association of Newspapers in Brazil (ANJ), accounting for a whopping 90% of Brazil’s newspaper circulation, have left Google News.

Google didn’t budge on publisher requests to be paid, so now, Google apparently has a lot less Brazilian news sources in its system. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Google users will necessarily have a hard time finding the content, as pulling out of Google News hardly keeps your content from being crawled by Google. In fact, Google’s regular web results often come from news publishers, and with Google’s increased emphasis on freshness in recent months, there’s a good chance that brand new articles will show up for news-related queries.

Publishers who don’t want to be crawled by Google at all, can keep the search engine from doing so with robots.txt, but publishers face losing a ton of traffic by doing so. Then, the question becomes, will users miss these sources enough to go directly to their sites and give them whatever compensation they may be seeking?

Browsing Google News for Brazil, it doesn’t look like there is a shortage of available content for people to read.

Last month, Google celebrated the tenth anniversary of Google News, reporting that it is now available in 72 editions and 30 languages, and that it counted 50,000 publications among its news sources. I guess the number is slightly less now.

That doesn’t mean Google is doing this right now, or that they definitely will, but…come on.

“In principle, there’s nothing wrong with the concept of an infographic,” Cutts says in the interview. “What concerns me is the types of things that people are doing with them. They get far off topic, or the fact checking is really poor. The infographic may be neat, but if the information it’s based on is simply wrong, then it’s misleading people.”

“The other thing that happens is that people don’t always realize what they are linking to when they reprint these infographics,” he adds. “Often the link goes to a completely unrelated site, and one that they don’t mean to endorse. Conceptually, what happens is they really buy into publishing the infographic, and agree to include the link, but they don’t actually care about what it links to. From our perspective this is not what a link is meant to be.”

I don’t think it’s much of a surprise to a lot of people that Google would consider not counting these kinds of links. In fact, last month, we ran an article from David Leonhardt, who talked about this very thing.

There are certainly legitimate infographics, just as there are legitimate directories, but there is always that room for abuse, and it could represent something like what Google considers to be a linking scheme (which is against its quality guidelines).

“I would not be surprised if at some point in the future we did not start to discount these infographic-type links to a degree,” Cutts told Enge. “The link is often embedded in the infographic in a way that people don’t realize, vs. a true endorsement of your site.”

I think that says it all. If you have a major infograhpic strategy that’s built for SEO purposes, I wouldn’t put too much stock into it moving forward. That doesn’t mean, however, that infographics can’t still provide value, and certainly spark some quality social traffic.

That’s only a small part of Enge’s interview with Cutts. Read the whole thing here.

Hat tip: Barry Schwartz

The premise isn’t all that complicated: go to Bing Webmaster Tools, click on the Disavow Links under the Dashboard menu, and – presto – simply submit the page, directory, or domain that you suspect to be coming from spam or poor quality sites.

Bing Webmaster Tools resident SEO samurai Duane Forrester explained in a blog post how the Disavow Links feature can help protect your site from malicious links but cautions that you won’t be able to go a-roving across the internet to cook up a better rank for your site.

These signals help us understand when you find links pointing to your content that you want to distance yourself from for any reason. You should not expect a dramatic change in your rankings as a result of using this tool, but the information shared does help Bing understand more clearly your intent around links pointing to your site.

Forrester adds that there isn’t a limit on the number of links you can report with the Disavow Links tool.

The launch of the feature presents two pretty obvious questions: 1/ What’s taking Google so long to launch a similar tool?, and 2/ What does Bing get out of launching this tool?

The answer to the first question is as elusive as the end of the rainbow, and probably only Google’s webspam avenger Matt Cutts could answer that one. The second question was discussed by Search Engine Land’s Vanessa Fox, who inferred that Bing’s release of this tool may indicate that Bing does in fact penalize websites that have bad backlinks.

Forrester has always been fairly accessible and welcoming of questions about whatever webmasters may have concerning Bing Webmaster Tools and he’s already been answering questions from users over on Twitter.

Follow @rjonesx

rjonesx
@rjonesx

@duaneforrester is the disavow only for negative SEO? Are webmasters expected to remove bad links they created or can they just disavow?

Follow @DuaneForrester

duane forrester
@DuaneForrester

@rjonesx Disavow is good, cleaning the mess is better.

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
10 hours ago via HootSuite · powered by @socialditto

Follow @rjonesx

rjonesx
@rjonesx

@iPullRank it’s a fair question, but if @duaneforrester and crew limit it to disavowing negative seo, it will mitigate that issue some

Follow @chriscountey

Chris Countey
@chriscountey

@rjonesx I still don’t get it. Why would disavowing links in BWT do anything? cc @iPullRank@DuaneForrester

Follow @DuaneForrester

duane forrester
@DuaneForrester

@chriscountey@rjonesx@iPullRank It helps us understand a webmaster’s intent – bought links? 4 shame. Disavow, perhaps u r changing?

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
10 hours ago via HootSuite · powered by @socialditto

Ultimately, why wouldn’t Bing have a tool like this available to webmasters? It falls in line with what Bing’s been working on to improve the overall quality of its search algorithms, specifically with the search engine’s recent Phoenix Update. Plus, it just helps keeps the web all much less janky.

At any rate, anybody webmasters out there plan on using this tool to see how it affects your site’s ranking (if at all)? Let us know what you think.

In a WebmasterWorld forum post (via Barry Scwhartz), member neildt said that they noticed a page they thought had been hit by Penguin, had returned to ranking for the keyword phrase they were targeting. “Now it’s either just a coincidence that it has returned, or it is due to the changes we made throughout our site for this page based on why we were hit by Penguin,” neildt wrote.

“Basically from the 24th April when we appeared to be affected by Google’s Penguin update, I took a totally random page that was affected and changed the internal linking structure that pointed to the page,” neildt wrote. “Before the 24th April this page would rank on page 1 of Google for ‘hotel name’ and ‘hotel name city’ as example phrases we were targeting. After this time, the ranking for those phrases was beyond page 30 of Google’s SERPS.”

“Until yesterday (Sunday 24 June) when I checked if these phrases had made any progress and there were some changes in Google’s SERPs,” neildt continued. “To my surprise we are ranking on page 1 for ‘hotel name city’ and page 3 for ‘hotel name’.

At this point, it’s unclear whether or not Google launched a data refresh for the Penguin update over the weekend. We’ve reached out to the company, and will update when we learn more.

Schwartz, who linked to the forum thread where this Penguin recovery is being discussed, says he has heard other rumors of a Google update, that may have occurred on Thursday night.

As far as Penguin goes, clearly it is possible to recover. You may or may not need to start with a freshly designed site, but make sure you’re in total compliance with Google’s quality guidelines. For more details on another recent recovery, read here.

When the webmaster from that story recovered, there had been a Penguin data refresh.

Image: The Batman Season 4 Episode 2 (Warner Bros.)

Would you find such a tool useful? Let us know in the comments.

Matt McGee at SMX sister site Search Engine Land liveblogged the conversation. Here’s his quote of Cutts, which was in response to a question about negative SEO:

The story of this year has been more transparency, but we’re also trying to be better about enforcing our quality guidelines. People have asked questions about negative SEO for a long time. Our guidelines used to say it’s nearly impossible to do that, but there have been cases where that’s happened, so we changed the wording on that part of our guidelines.

Some have suggested that Google could disavow links. Even though we put in a lot of protection against negative SEO, there’s been so much talk about that that we’re talking about being able to enable that, maybe in a month or two or three.

We recently wrote about Google’s wording change regarding negative SEO, which seemed to be an admission from the company that this practice is indeed possible. These words from Cutts seem to be further confirmation.

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, recently issued a challenge to people to show that if you have a strong enough reputation and link profile, you can’t be hurt by negative SEO. That seemed to go pretty well, but not everyone has the reputation of SEOmoz, even if they don’t necessarily have a bad one. Such a tool from Google could go a long way in helping combat negative SEO practices.

As far as people suggesting that Google could disavow links, Search Engine Land editor Barry Schwartz actually had a pretty good article talking about this last month. “The concept is simple,” he wrote. “You go to your link report in Google Webmaster Tools and have an action button that says ‘don’t trust this link’ or something like it. Google will then take that as a signal to not use that link as part of their link graph and ranking algorithm.”

“What I can’t understand is why hasn’t Google released it yet,” he wrote. “It is a great way for Google to do mass spam reporting by webmasters and SEOs without calling it spam reporting. You will have all these webmasters rush after a penalty to call out which links they feel are hurting them. Google can take that data to back up their algorithms to on links they already know are spam but also find new links that they might not have caught.”

He went on to make the point that Google would find more spam this way.

Once Google launches this tool, assuming that it actually does, it will be very interesting to see how the rankings shake out. It should be an indication of just how important links actually are these days.

As you may know, Google has sent out a ton of Webmaster Tools warnings this year, and such a tool would help users take quick “manual action” on links rather than spend a ton of time sending link removal requests to other sites. It might even prevent some lawsuits (and the death of the web as we know it).

According to Cutts, however, not many of the warnings were actually about links.

Update: Here’s his clarification:

Matt Cutts   15 minutes ago Earlier this year, Google revealed that we sent out over 700,000 messages to site owners in January and February 2012 via our free webmaster console at http://google.com/webmasters . I wanted to clarify a misconception about those messages. A lot of people assumed that most or all of the 700K messages were related to "unnatural link warnings" that some site owners received.

The reason for sending the 700,000 messages via Webmaster Tools was actually because we started sending out warnings about blackhat techniques. The vast, vast majority of manual actions we take are on pages that are engaging in egregious blackhat SEO techniques, such as automatically created gibberish or cloaking.

In fact, of the messages that we sent out to site owners, only around 3% were for unnatural or artificial links. So just to be clear, of the 700,000 messages we sent out in January and February, well above 600,000 were for obvious blackhat spam, and under 25,000 of the messages were for unnatural links. #smx   #seo  

---

Google Sent Over 700,000 Messages Via Webmaster Tools In Past Two Months
At SMX West last week Tiffany Oberoi from Google shared that Google has sent over 700,000 messages to webmasters via Google Webmaster Tools in January and February 2012. That is more than the total nu… 16   6 Powered by socialditto

By the way, Google only sends those messages when it’s a penalty, and penalties, as far as Google is concerned, are manual action.

It will be interesting to see if the new link tool helps a lot of sites recover from algorithm updates like Penguin, and/or prevents a lot of sites from getting hit. Will we see less complaining about Google’s algorithm changes? Somehow, I doubt that. I have no reason to believe we will see less finger pointing.

Will you use the new link tool if Google provides it? Let us know in the comments.

Now, the serious stuff.

Cutts participated in a keynote discussion at SMX Advanced, and while much of the talk was about Penguin, the subject of paid links also came up. SMX sister site Search Engine Land has a liveblogged account of the discussion. Here’s what Cutts said about paid links, according to that:

We’re always working on improving our tools. Some of the tools that we built, for example, to spot blog networks, can also be used to spot link buying. People sometimes think they can buy links without a footprint, but you don’t know about the person on the other side. People need to realize that, as we build up new tools, paid links becomes a higher risk endeavor. We’ve said it for years, but we’re starting to enforce it more.

It makes you wonder how safe those directories that charge for “reviews” to potentially get links are.

The liveblog continues:

I believe, if you ask any SEO, is SEO harder now than 5-6 years ago, I think they’d say it’s a little more challenging. You can expect that to increase. Google is getting more serious about buying and selling links. Penguin showed that some stuff that may work short term won’t work in the long term.

On a semi-related note, Cutts also talked about paid inclusion, given that this has been in the news, as it relates to Google’s new sponsored results and Google Shopping.

“You call it paid inclusion, but it’s a separately labeled box and it’s not in web ranking,” Cutts told Danny Sullivan, according to the liveblog, which continues: “Google’s take on paid inclusion is when you take money and don’t disclose it. Google’s web rankings remain just as pure as they were 10 years ago. We have more stuff around the edges, that’s true, but that stuff is helpful. Matt mentions using Google Flight Search to book his trip here to Seattle. ‘You can’t buy higher rankings. That hasn’t changed. I don’t expect it to change.’”

At the conference, Cutts also revealed that Google is considering launching a tool that would allow webmasters to tell Google to ignore certain links. The idea is already attracting a lot of praise from webmasters, many of which though Google should have had something like this long ago. Cutts indicated that such a tool would be several months away.

Since then, SEOmoz has been doing somde extensive data gathering, investigating the situation further. Kurtis Bohrnstedt, the company’s “Captain of Special Projects” gathered a total of 2,678 directories, and only found 200 of them to be banned, but an additional 340 to be penalized (as in not de-indexed, but not ranking for obvious terms where they would be the only result that makes sense).

Still, that’s only 540 directories out of 2,678. It would seem that there are a lot more directories in the clear, but Bohrnstedt thinks this is only Google sending a warning, and that there is likely more to come.

“That is not to say the ones left unharmed are safe from a future algorithmic update,” he writes. “In fact, I suspect this update was intended to serve as a warning; Google will be cracking down on directories. Why? In my own humble opinion, most of the classic, ‘built-for-SEO-and-links’ directories do not provide any benefit to users, falling under the category of non-content spam.”

I wonder if that includes directories that are apparently built for SEO and links and charge webmasters for the chance to get links, but offer some form of editorial oversight.

Interestingly, when this topic was being discussed a couple weeks ago, one webmaster said he had a paid directory he hadn’t touched in years, which was unexpectedly seeing an increase in PageRank.