Google is changing how it enforces a controversial search-spam rule across Europe after publishers complained that the policy unfairly pushed their websites down in search results, a concession that could help Alphabet avoid a potentially significant European Union antitrust penalty.
Alphabet’s Google said it had changed its spam policy in Europe to address regulatory concerns surrounding its “site reputation abuse” rules. The policy targets third-party pages that attempt to exploit a host website’s established ranking signals to improve their position in Google Search, a practice often described as parasite SEO.
Publishers Said Google’s Spam Rules Hurt Legitimate Content
The dispute centers on how Google distinguishes manipulative SEO practices from legitimate commercial partnerships.
Reuters reported that EU regulators said their monitoring found that Google’s policy had demoted news media and other publishers when their sites contained content from commercial partners. Publishers argued that the policy could therefore penalize legitimate business models alongside the spam practices Google was trying to suppress.
Google will now change how those penalties are applied inside the European Economic Area. Beginning August 30, manual actions that demote websites under the policy will no longer apply to users in the EU’s 27 member states, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. The company said the policy will remain unchanged outside the EEA.
For publishers and SEO-dependent businesses, that creates an unusual regional split: the same content relationship could be treated differently by Google depending on where a search user is located.
The Digital Markets Act Is Reaching Into Search Ranking
The European Commission had opened an investigation into the policy under the Digital Markets Act, which is designed to constrain the market power of major technology platforms designated as gatekeepers.
Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier welcomed Google’s decision, saying the change means Google Search will “no longer demote press publications solely for hosting third-party content”. He added that regulators will continue monitoring Google’s implementation to determine whether the revised approach complies with the DMA.
The Times of India shared that the financial exposure is substantial. Violations of the Digital Markets Act can result in fines of up to 10% of a company’s global annual turnover.
Search Algorithms Are Becoming Regulatory Infrastructure
For technology companies, the larger story is that EU competition rules are increasingly reaching into how platform algorithms actually operate, rather than focusing only on contracts or acquisitions.
Google’s spam policy was fundamentally a ranking-system decision: determine which pages appear to exploit another domain’s authority, then reduce their visibility. But when that technical rule materially affects publishers and commercial partners, regulators can treat the underlying algorithm as a market-access issue.
That puts search engineering in a new environment. Ranking policies may now need to account not only for relevance and manipulation, but also for whether their enforcement creates discriminatory effects for business users.
For publishers, SEO companies and platforms dependent on Google traffic, the reversal is therefore bigger than one spam-policy adjustment. It shows that in Europe, the rules embedded inside ranking algorithms are increasingly becoming part of antitrust compliance itself.
