Based on the report seen here, there are strong indications that News Corp., father company to Hulu and Fox News, has begun their exodus from the Google search results as they had once promised. What is most interesting from the report is the data is demonstrating that some sites that actually rely on Google for their traffic, are among the sites that have suddenly dropped off of Google Index. Sites such as MySpace, IGN and RottenTomatoes are among those sites that are no longer being indexed with the intensity they once were.

Now there is some question as to exactly what allowed NewsCorp. to do this as it seems that their own robots.txt file(s) are not visuably responsible for this sudden drop off the Google indexing map. Were they banned? Perhaps instead of using the logical approach to blocking individual pages from their sites, News Corp. simply opted to find an alternative to what the rest of the website owners out there might use? It’s all speculation at this point, but we will be watching this one for sure.

What does this mean to you?

If you are someone who bookmarks and/or otherwise uses other methods of subscription for News Corp websites, it will mean very little. The biggest change is that you will see News Corp. content showing up a lot less in individual key search queries and perhaps the same with Google News. So in the end, you will likely only be affected if you rely on search engines to read/watch their content. Short of this, I doubt most people will see a clear difference or even more than, care whatsoever.

Sadly, News Corp. has yet to realize that latter fact. Perhaps one day, they will realize that blocking the hand that feeds you really servers no good for anyone. But that is for another time and place I suppose.