Google Clarifies Their Approach to Content

by Darren McLaughlin

No one can deny what a huge part of the content business Google is. Their Adsense program has helped to spawn tons of webpreneuers who happily cobble content daily. But there have always been some nagging questions about how Google indexes the web to make their money.

Google announced their approach to content, which highlights a few concepts.

The main tenets are:

Because we don’t own this content, over the years we’ve come up with three primary principles to ensure that we respect content owners and protect their rights:

* we respect copyright;
* we let owners choose whether we index their content in our products;
* we try to bring benefit back to content owners by partnering with them.

Their intrepretation of respect might be different than other organizations. There are no real surprises here (except maybe for the fact they felt a need to clarify their policy at all). Google respects copyright holders, but it’s up to the holders to do the work to protect their work.

You can’t assume that any information you publish to the internet is secure. You’ll need to go to great lengths to protect yourself, and Google won’t help. They don’t plan on offering any type of “opt-in” program. Instead, they’ve opted to have webmasters “opt-out” once they’re already in by default.

Of course, some people argue that we should be asking content owners to opt in, not requiring them to opt out. Google aims to provide comprehensive search results. This would be impossible in a world where permission simply to index (which is entirely legal) was necessary. But we also believe that opt-out rather than opt-in benefits not just Google users, but also content owners.

If you don’t want content in Google’s index, Opt-Out.

There you have it. Just opt-out if you want. I really have no problem with this attitude myself. I would assume the average webmaster really does want information found. And for those that don’t “robots.txt” should do the trick.

John Battelle also wrote an interesting piece on this subject after he got clarification of the clarification from a Google rep.

One big problem with Opt-out, though, is that even if you do, your information will still be publicly available in Google’s Cache for years to come. This can be a BIG problem in the event of damaging information. One solution is to eliminating your website from Google’s Cache.