As you may know, Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp., is saying he may block search engines from accessing the organization’s content. He expressed this notion in a recent interview.

If Murdoch were to act upon this, it would mean theoretically that you would no longer be able to find Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc. content on Google. Of course that would be in a world where scraped content isn’t frequently crawled by search engines.

If Murdoch were to pull all of the original content, he would risk all of his content just being found on other sites through Google (or Yahoo or Bing or wherever). The reality is that illegal scraping will continue to exist, and search engines aren’t perfect. There is a great chance that they will still crawl the content, without even knowing it was originally produced by News Corp. properties. With News Corp.’s content in the search engines, at least the engines will be able to place that content higher in results where it would be more likley to drown out the scraped versions.

This week, a Google spokesman told Emma Barnett at the Telegraph, "Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute."

and…

"If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do is tell us."

So in other words, Google is fine with Murdoch pulling out. News Corp.’s the one that stands to lose more from that. Experian Hitwise shared some rather interesting data with WebProNews:

- On a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25% of WSJ.com’s traffic. 
 
- According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are "new" users who haven’t visited the domain in the last 30 days.

- Twitter and Facebook sent 4% of US visits to News and Media sites in October 2009. (via @Hitwise_US)

It’s interesting to look at the above graphs and note that WSJ.com is getting considerably more traffic from Google and Google news than in years past. It will also be interesting to see if Murdoch goes through with pulling content from Google.

As it stands right now, it is still easy to go to Google News and find content from the Wall Street Journal. If that and other News Corp.- owned publications are removed, that can only mean increased traffic for similar sites.

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