Tax hyperlinks! A European bill - SEO SEO agency, Web copywriting, backlinking

No, it’s not the first of April, a European directive attacks freedom of information and creation with a bill that would change copyright

… And create a specific copyright for the hyperlink!

Going against the founding principle of the Web — the sharing of information — this directive would disrupt the uses of the Web and drastically modify SEO.

Two main axes in the project under discussion

Create a copyright on links:

The principle: when you make a link to a press site (both from a website and a simple share on social networks), you will have to pay a copyright for the medium pointed to.

Charge Google News

It is the desire of the public authorities to regulate and tax Google news, which is at the origin of this bill, but the project presented is so vague that it can be applied to any type of link and to the entire Web.

The press , complaining that their content is aggregated by the ” Google News engine”, has suggested that MEPs find a way to tax the search engine giant in this way

SEO nonsense

The principle of charging for a link to free content that has already been published on the Web does not make sense.

Rather than wanting to tax or ban it, I tend to encourage it because I think external links bring

added value to the discourse held in the article,
additional information related to the subject matter
and is user friendly

I add that I am certain that these links are not penalized by Penguin as long as they remain relevant and justified.

Moreover, I don’t need to remind you of the weight of links in SEO (SEO).

Don’t press sites have an SEO expert on their staff ?

Do they no longer want to be placed on the 1st page of Google ? Past experience in Germany and Spain corroborates this remark.

These two countries have already tried to apply this type of tax and have imposed this principle of copyright on links to Google News. The reaction of the search engine giant was not long in coming: Closure of the Google noticias service and de-indexing of the rebels in Google Lex

Naturally, these sites have seen their traffic drop drastically, and the press bosses have backtracked by going to renegotiate the deal. The press, which has already seen its print clientele erode over the past 10 years, risked nothing less than its death in the medium term.

Europe is one step ahead in terms of respect for privacy ( Hadopi law, unenforceable) and is trying to recover the taxes they lose on the tax optimization practiced by Web behemoths such as Amazon, Apple, Google, etc.

If it were to succeed as it is, there is no doubt that it would change the Netlinking practices that are so favorable to SEO.

This is a case that I will follow on this blog.

Another point about this bill:

Automatic deletion of shared videos

As is already done on YouTube for pirated content such as movies or music (which seems normal), this censorship would be generalized to all content on the entire Web.

This would therefore concern

The excerpts (teaser)
Video quotes
“misappropriated content”
Parodies
Montages using 10 seconds of content that is not directly authored.

This is enoughto severely imitate the right to create and delete the millions of “shared personal channels” on the Internet. It is still only a directive under study, but it mobilizes a lot of Internet players and not only the most subversive.

As this aspect of the text is not directly linked to referencing, I will not develop this aspect of the bill.

This does not mean that I support this obstacle to artistic creation and content sharing.