Tag Archives: links

Google due in Spanish court to appeal data protection restrictions

Google has said that it is due to appear in a Madrid court tomorrow to challenge a demand that it remove links to newspaper articles and official gazettes.

According to the search company, it is to appeal orders by Spain’s Data Protection Agency (AEPD) that it removes links to articles which are the subject of complaints relating to privacy.

Google director of external relations for Europe, Peter Barron published the following statement today:

We are disappointed by the actions of the Spanish privacy regulator. Spanish and European law rightly hold the publisher of the material responsible for its content.

Requiring intermediaries like search engines to censor material published by others would have a profound, chilling effect on free expression without protecting people’s privacy.

The Spanish DPA has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Update:

The Spanish DPA has now responded to our request for comment. It says in cases where a complaint it made and the page hosting the information cannot erase the data because there is a law that protects the publication or a conflict with another fundamental right (freedom of expression), the majority of the AEPD resolutions order search engines to avoid indexing the information of those users as recognition of “the right of the applicants to be forgotten”.

Nieman Journalism Lab: Are news organisations thinking about linking?

“Links can add a lot of value to stories, but the journalism profession as a whole has been surprisingly slow to take them seriously. That’s my conclusion from several months of talking to organizations and reporters about their linking practices, and from counting the number and type of links from hundreds of stories,” writes Jonathan Stray.

Stray looks at the linking policies and strategies of BBC News, Reuters, Dow Jones, the Washington Post, the New York Times and Associated Press. There’s more to come from this research, but some initial conclusions suggest there’s a way to go when it comes to linking out:

Reading between the lines, it seems that most newsrooms have yet to make a strong commitment to linking. This would explain the mushiness of some of the answers I received, where news organizations “encourage” their reporters or offer “guidance” on linking.

Full post at this link…

Late Night Marketing: How one newspaper lost 5,000 incoming links

Late Night Marketing discusses how Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.no lost more than 5,000 natural “inlinks” (links to its website from external sites and blogs) to its website by disabling a feature from blog search engine Twingly on its website:

The first thing here is that Dagbladet.no now loses a lot of blog traffic, but this is not the most important thing, because the traffic from blogs is not enormous compared to the traffic a newspaper can gain from good rankings on search engines.

What do you think that Google will think of your site if you suddenly have approximately 5,000 fewer incoming links per month?

Full post at this link…