Google 'Forgets' Publisher Articles as EU Takedowns Begin

by Carly Page,July 3, 2014Comments

Google has started taking down search results following Europe's 'right to be forgotten' ruling in May, with both the BBC and The Guardian seeing articles being removed from the search engine.

The BBC and the Guardian reported that pieces have been removed from Google, such as a column by Robert Peston commenting on bankers' woes during the 2007 financial crisis. The Guardian's James Ball said that six of the paper's articles have been removed from Google search.

Ball is calling for publishers to revolt against this, and has asked that media outlets set up Twitter accounts that tweet the links of articles that have been pulled from Google.

Google started removing search results last week, following the European Court of Justice landmark "right to be forgotten" ruling in May.

A Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal at the time, "This week we're starting to take action on the removals requests that we've received.

"This is a new process for us. Each request has to be assessed individually, and we're working as quickly as possible to get through the queue."

Google didn't sound too pleased about the whole thing, and didn't reveal any further details about the process, which means it's not clear how many requests the firm has received, nor how many it has removed so far. If recent reports are to be believed, takedown requests have topped the 50,000 level.

Bloomberg noted that, as well as articles from the BBC and Guardian, the interrnet search engine has removed a link to a Spanish newspaper that was the target of a court case by Mario Costeja Gonzalez. A Search of Gonzalez's name now shows text at the bottom of the page, which reads, "Some results may have been removed under data-protection law in Europe."

"We're showing this notice in Europe when a user searches for most names, not just pages that have been affected by a removal," Google clarified on its website.

Towards the end of May, Google started offering EU citizens an online tool to fill out if they want a link removed from its search results.

When submitting a request, Google said that users will have to provide at least one kind of photo ID, and stated that links will only be removed if the information is erroneous, misleading or no longer relevant.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

Publisher Guide for Adding Custom Variables in Google Tag Manager

If you're an online publisher using Google Analytics, I'm sure you've heard this before: you need to use custom variables so that you can really segment and measure your audience.

You also most likely are currently working on migrating to Google Tag Manager in order to make your life easier.

So how do you implement them together? What follows is a step-by-step guide for installing publisher-centered custom variables using Google Tag Manager.

I am going to assume, that you already have Google Tag Manager installed in your site and that one of your tags is the asynch GA js. If you don't, read this first.

Google's Justin Cutroni recommends adding seven custom variables for publishers. This article will go in detail and breakdown how to install four of them:

CategoryContent TypePublication DateAuthor

These four custom variables at the most basic level gets you a good idea of your overall site performance. Once you add these data points, you can also get closer to information that other publisher-centered analytics tools such as Parsely track.

Let's jump in!

3 Things You Need to Know Before You BeginThese custom variables should be implemented on the page level. For all the custom variables mentioned above, the value changes as the user goes from one page to the next. For example, a user might read an article by author one and then click on a link that goes to an article by Author 2. This is true for all the custom variables aforementionedYou're going to need a data layer. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The best and only way to have these custom variables on your site is via data layer. If you want to read more about this, here's an article that gives a good explanation of how data layers work.You need the help of your front-end engineer. If you don't know this yet, you will, a good analytics person is always good to his or her front-end engineers.

Ask your front-end engineer to create a data layer that contains the four custom variables we want to add: Content Type, Author, Category, and Published Date. Direct them to the developer documentation on adding data layer for Google Tag Manager. There are two key things to check in the developer implementation:

Make sure that the data layer comes before the Google Tag Manager code (we inserted ours before the /head tag).I like keeping my values in small caps, this eliminates any potential duplicate entries that could be created due to any weird capitalizations.

Check out the way we set up the data layer in one of our sites. The data layer in the source code for that page will look like below.