I think I have stumbled upon the real reason why Rupert Murdoch is so keen to protect his NewsInternational publications from the Google bots.

Here’s a screengrab of Google News UK a few minutes ago – spot the obvious typo (after the jump).

Times Online in typo shocker

Aside from the obvious joke that this sort of typo is more expected from The Grauniad, it’s interesting on two points:

  1. Unless the Google Algorithm has built in mis-spellings like this, it suggests the headline (or meta headline) only plays a small part in determining which stories get picked up.
  2. The headline published on Google News is not the same as the headline on the Times website “Civil servants and axed IT to pay for Tory tax cut”.
    The sub has input an alternative title (meta-title) for this story – good practice from an SEO perspective.

This begs the question – why are they bothering to optimise for Google if they regard Google’s linking to stories as theft?

Here’s a quote from Rupert Murdoch, via The Telegraph

“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com…”

hmmmmmm…..