Antitrust allegations against
Google Italy
Italy's antitrust watchdog (Autorita Garante della
Concorrenza e del Mercato) is investigating allegations by an Italian
association of news publishers (Federazione
Italiana Editori Giornali (FIEG)) that Google Italy is discriminating against
newspapers that don't want their content linked on Google's news site by also
dropping them from its search engine. The members of the association probably
should have talked to an search engine optimizer first: They probably used
robots.txt to get excluded from Google News. Because search engine spiders,
including the Googlebots, don't distinguish between indexing for news and web
search, that's the reason why the sites of the newspapers automatically also
disappeared from the web search.
See:
Debunking The Italian Newspapers’ Antitrust Allegations Against Google,
Searchengineland