Google changes spam policy in EU to avert antitrust fine

Alphabet's Google announced on Friday that it would modify its spam policy in the European Union in an effort to avoid potential antitrust penalties. The issue arose after publishers raised concerns over Google's site reputation abuse policy, which targeted the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site, known as parasite SEO, to manipulate search rankings.

The European Union expressed concern that Google's policy was negatively impacting news media and other publishers' websites and content by lowering their search engine rankings when the sites included content from commercial partners. Google stated that starting August 30, any manual actions taken to demote sites within the European Economic Area (EEA) would not be applied to users in the 27 EU nations, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein.

However, the policy would remain unchanged outside the EEA. The European Commission, acting as the EU's competition regulator, had initiated an investigation under the Digital Markets Act due to concerns about the policy. Violations of the DMA could result in fines of up to 10% of a company's global annual revenue.