Yesterday, Facebook took a bold move and announced it's banning Australians from sharing and viewing news and all users from sharing from and viewing Australian news pages. But one thing it added was why Google may decide to take a different step.
Facebook wrote "the answer is because our platforms have fundamentally different relationships with news. Google Search is inextricably intertwined with news and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content."
Danny Sullivan, the public Search Liaison at Google, said this is not correct. He wrote on Twitter "to clarify this point Facebook asserted about Google Search: "Publishers do not voluntarily provide their content." Danny said "publishers *do* choose to appear or not in Google Search & Google News." He then linked to how publishers can this way.
As you know, Google took bold steps to warn Australians about this change and even said they may have to remove search completely in Australia. But we will see what happens.
To clarify this point Facebook asserted about Google Search: “Publishers do not voluntarily provide their content.”
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) February 17, 2021
Publishers *do* choose to appear or not in Google Search & Google News. These cover the ways this is done:
https://t.co/nmzXOhG0Q4https://t.co/nmzXOhG0Q4
I am excited to see what happens.
It is sad that even some Australian SEO blogs cannot be shared:
To be clear, this isn't something that I'm worried about for my site. It's a small blog, that gets very little traffic from FB anyway. Just surprised more than anything that it's been included. I'd guess that the blocking will be short-lived, but we'll see what happens.
— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) February 18, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.
