NewsNow itself has been voluntarily switching on and off crawling of a handful of sites over the last couple of months, as a debate grows over the propriety of the link economy. We understand that switching off its spider has had a small negative impact on some of the sites’ traffic.

“We’re not big fans of their business model,” Mirror.co.uk digital director Matt Kelly told paidContent:UK.

Mirror.co.uk is now lock-step with News International, with which it famously trades barbs in the offline world of UK tabloids. It’s is firmly on-record as no longer giving a toss for the cow-towing to search traffic, instead seeking loyal, repeat readers. This is effectively a move to downplay the incursion of the mere occasional reader in to the sites’ traffic logs, instead preferring to show higher-“quality” readers to their advertisers.

Mirror Group Newspapers’ combined online traffic broke the 10 million monthly uniques mark at the end of 2009, but remained sixth out of seven fully ABCe-audited UK national newspaper sites.