Analysts Dismiss News Corp’s Bing Gamble

Tancer said the top 100 Google search terms sending traffic to the WSJ.com accounted for over 21.6 percent of all Google search traffic to WSJ.com. Of that 21.6 percent, 13.4 percent were navigational or brand searches to find the WSJ.com, so even if Murdoch decides to block Google, these navigational search queries will likely remain intact.

“As newspapers continue to search for a way out of the search rip current, it’s hard not to root for [News Corp. founder Rupert] Murdoch’s maverick de-index strategy, that being said, the numbers bring us back to reality,” Tancer wrote. “As print continues to haemorrhage readership, could blocking your most significant traffic source be a wise choice?”

The fresh News Corp.-Microsoft rumours come two weeks after Murdoch said he was leaning toward making paid content from the Journal and other sites invisible from Google’s search index by adding a few code snippets to those sites’ Robot.text files.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis said this could be the thing to help Bing finally ding Google, which leads the market with a 65 percent search share to Bing’s roughly 10 percent, according to comScore. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan said the evidence just doesn’t support the facts.