This is a very interesting development and raises a ton of questions. The first thing that comes to mind as an SEO practitioner is that newspapers do very well in the search engine results pages. This is clearly due to the massive authority they have because of the mountains of unique content they produce and the number of other sites linking to them (among other factors).

If newspapers are going to restrict free access to their news then I’d expect that Google would severely restrict their access to page one listings for keywords that are relevant to any newspaper articles that have to be paid for. Most users expect free news and there is plenty of it around, so if Google clutters up page one with subscriptions pages any search engine that bucks this approach will pinch their share.

The truth is that if I have paid for a subscription I’d have my RSS feed reader pull in the news or have a bookmark on my toolbar,  so if I was actually searching for news I’d want to be served up free options not subscription pages.

If Google does penalize news sites for offering up subscription pages (which it should as a subscription page isn’t relevant to a keyword search for ‘Lancashire hot cakes murder trial’), then this could open the field for smaller free news services to get some extra traffic.

It seems to me that the news providers are getting around this potential for a penalty by allowing visitors to view the first few articles free, but for any heavy news searcher it won’t be long before their search results are bunged up with subscription pages.

I understand that print media has taken a big hit but they have enough money and resources to come up with creative advertising related models. Trying to stem the flow of news will just open the field for smaller web sites and word of mouth reporting via social media, which if you think about it could be better than some of the garbage that comes out of the major press!