Google drops Times Online from news index

NB, update from freshegg 3:10pm: “www.timesonline.co.uk is now back in Google’s index.  They went from having 0 pages indexed this morning to a quarter of a million just now.  The SEO guys at the Times are saying there was a technical issue of some sort causing the dropout – I am unconvinced and cannot see how any technical problem (which no SEO I know could detect) could simply take an entire site out of the index and then pop it back in again.  All I can say is I can imagine both Google and The Times offices have had busy mornings with plenty of heated phone calls.”

Coinciding with the launch of Times Online’s much debated paywall, Google appears to have removed the paper’s online site – www.timesonline.co.uk –  from their index entirely.”

According to a report by freshegg, by way of Malcolm Coles, searches for “times online” or for the entire subdomain return zero results.

Freshegg says: “it seems that Google has manually removed the entire timesonline.co.uk site from its index, either at the direct request of Rupert Murdoch (or his best minions), or perhaps this was an initiative from Google itself”

Subdomains such as  business.timesonline.co.uk and technology.timesonline.co.uk are currently still indexed though this may change down the line.

Nod to Garry Davis at WhyCommunicate? for bringing this to our attention.