Google's Policy to Affect Websites' Traffic

Peter Bale who is the executive producer of MSN UK and former online editorial director of The Times and the Sunday Times, talked about the recent changes made in the Google policies which are now promoting the original content published by some agencies and avoid driving traffic to websites offering similar articles. In case you haven't heard about it, Google decided to create special Google News pages for Press Association, Associated Press and Agence-France Presse in order to promote their content. In addition, the Mountain View company implemented a special Google News function which enables the visitors to filter the content and remove the similar subjects from being displayed on the Google service.

Peter Bale warned the news websites which are currently listed on Google News that they might record a serious loss in traffic because the search giant's technology will stop redirecting the users to their articles. And this is pretty obvious since the users will be able to remove the duplicate stories from showing up.

"While the agencies will consider it [the Google deal] as welcome news publishers, the likes of the Guardian, Times and Sun, need to be aware of a bump down in traffic from that," he said according to MediaGuardian.co.uk.

Google News is one of the most important sources of traffic for the news websites which are registered to appear on the official page of the service. In case you haven't heard of this yet, Google News receives articles and information from approximately 4,500 sources, it organizes all of them in categories and offers them to the consumers on a single website.

The Google technology has been always criticized by its rivals because they considered it receives content from other sources without paying for it. However, Google easily defended itself pointing to the links attached to the articles which redirect the users to the original authors of the news which makes Google News an important source of traffic.