As newspapers and old media companies have seen their revenues shrink, they have essentially done one of two things: found ways to embrace the web or blamed Google for their problems.

Now with the heat being turned up on Google by News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, the search giant has decided to appease angry media outlets and give them more control over how their links are treated in Google Search and Google News.

Will These Changes Be Enough?

There are two changes that Google hopes will quell the discontent of media outlets. The first one is a change to its “First Click Free” program, which allows users to visit an article for free, but directs them to a sign-up page if they browse to another page. For example, if you visited a Wall Street Journal article from Google News, you’d get the full article for free, but would have to pay for other articles.

The problem is that many people now abuse this feature to get all of their WSJ articles for free. The new change will limit you to five pages per day before you must register, regardless of how you get to the website. Media outlets can opt into this program if they so desire.

The second change is actually a change to how Google’s web crawlers index pages. Publishers now have the option to tell Google’s spiders to only crawl and index the “preview pages.” This refers to pages that display the first few paragraphs of an article on subscription sites like WSJ.com in order to entice them to pay for a subscription. If a publisher chooses to have spiders crawl their articles in this manner, they will be labeled with “subscription” within Google News.

While we think many media outlets have the wrong strategy to Google and social media, this compromise makes a lot of sense. Publishers worried that Google is exploiting them gain more control over what is displayed on Google and Google News. Google in return doesn’t lose publisher content.

We have to wait and see if these changes will be enough to appease Murdoch and company. These changes seem pretty fair to us.

Tags: Google, google news, News Corp, rupert murdoch