This morning the times announced that they had started to roll out their online Paywall! Now disaster for one of the biggest sites in the UK has been struck, and they have vanished from the Google SERPS!  Even when you run a search on Google for the “Times Online” you get the sub domain pages, in fact the www.timesonline.co.uk domain does not appear any where in Google.

Check out this screen shot from Google:

It would appear however that the site has not been “automatically” removed from Google and in fact has been MANUALLY deleted from the SERPS!  The site has no meta tags that instruct google to “noindex” and the pages are still accessible at the moment.  Which in effect means that the Paywall hasn’t been rolled out yet.  Suggesting that after the announcement, Google offices would have then found the Times Site and manually taken it out of the SERPS.

Whether or not this was a collaboration between Google and the Times leader Murdoch is unknown.  Interestingly as mentioned you can still access all of the sub domains but cannot access the main website.  There could be yet more changes to come, but at the moment, the main Times site looks as though it is a faint memory!