Google has begun testing removing EU-based news publishers in Google News, Google Search, and Google Discover for 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain (not France). Google is doing this to provide data on the impact this will make for these publishers if this would be rolled out to 100% of users.
Google wrote last week that "regulators and publishers have asked for additional data about the effect of news content in Search on peoples’ use of our products." So in order to supply this data, Google decided to run "a small, time-limited test in which we don't show results from EU-based news publishers in Google News, Search, and Discover."
Google said this "test will affect 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain." This will not happen for France, for other legal reasons, I believe. This also won't impact news publishers from outside of the EU, Google wrote they will "continue to show results from other websites, including news publishers based outside the EU."
I have yet to see complaints in the Google forums about news not coming up or searchers missing out. Nor did I see complaints from publishers about a drop in traffic related to this. I mean, it is just 1% of users...
As @largow pointed out the other day, the Google test of removing articles from EU-based news publishers just lost a country. Seems France was going to fine them €900K per day so Google dropped France from the test. More info in the article: https://t.co/eVdXU0EdJl https://t.co/cyjqsp5iyl
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 15, 2024
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
