Google changes spam policy in EU to avert antitrust fine

Alphabet's Google announced on Friday that it has revised its spam policy in Europe in response to EU concerns that could have led to an antitrust fine. The tech giant faced scrutiny from European Union regulators after publishers raised issues about its site reputation abuse policy, which targets the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site to manipulate search rankings by leveraging the host site's ranking signals, known as parasite SEO.

The European Commission, acting as the EU's competition enforcer, had opened an investigation under the Digital Markets Act, which seeks to curb the influence of Big Tech. Violations of the DMA could result in fines up to 10% of a company's global annual revenue. Google stated that starting August 30, any manual actions taken to demote sites due to the policy would not apply to users within the European Economic Area, which includes the 27 EU nations, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. However, the policy remains unchanged outside the European Economic Area.