Seth Godin may be wrong on this one?

Looks like Seth felt the urge to follow me (:>] in commenting on Rupert Murdoch thinking of blocking search engines from his site. 

His very short post "Murdoch has it backwards" basically says:

You don't charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.

If you can't make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.

Whilst I don't entirely disagree with him that blocking search engines is crazy for some, Murdoch does have a point about quality rather than quantity of traffic.  Quality is something Seth constantly hammers home.  Have a tribe, quality over quantity, don't SPAM people, build a following slowly, drip, drip, drip, challenge the norm, disrupt.

Surely his view on search engines is now following the norm.  Maybe Murdoch is changing the game - again - and search engines will need to rethink.  In the recruitment world, my view is that you can pick and choose which job search engines (not Google, Bing or Yahoo) you want to have index your jobs and send traffic to your site.  I think the job aggregators (Indeed, Simply Hired, Workhound etc) are great for what they are but in Murdoch's world they too are "content kleptomaniacs" and "parasites".  I would not personally use such harsh words but would suggest major employers don't need all of the channels available to them and more focus and emphasis on ROI will prove the value of each and ultimately stop some of them using unpaid for content.

Seth of course is more often right than wrong but I reckon I've got him on this one as far as recruitment is concerned.  I'll happily send him a slice of humble pie if not.