Rupert Murdoch’s pending decision to block search engines from crawling and indexing their sites is being debated all over the internet. The Wall Street Journal and New York times, which are under News Corp, might be taking their content off from search result pages. The fallout of this decision could be grave for the news agency. Current statistics reveal that these sites receive 25% of their visitors through the Google News website. Of the new users that go to their sites 44% originated through Google.

Google has responded to this move by saying “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organizations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute. Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

All the competition that lived under the news agency’s shadow will be able to get higher rankings. Most of the plagiarized content from News Corp’s sites will end up getting the traffic that should have been directed to News Corp’s sites instead. This decision comes in the middle of the debate between free and paid content. He argues that high quality content isn’t being recognized as much as it should. With the death of newspapers, free content is threatening the media industry. And preventing Google from indexing its pages is its first move toward the pay for content motion. If Rupert Murdoch does go ahead with the decision it could lead to very interesting times.