Google Ditches Manual Search Demotions in EU to Avoid Antitrust Fines
Google has made significant changes to its EU spam policy in an effort to avoid major antitrust penalties. The company's automated tools and manual actions had previously hurt legitimate news publications by reducing their search rankings.
The issue came to light when the European Commission investigated Google's handling of search results, revealing a problem with how it handled sites that use heavy parasite SEO tactics.
This tactic involves placing content on established sites to exploit their strong ranking on Google. However, Google's tools had been actively reducing the search rankings of media publications whenever they displayed sponsored content from commercial partners.
Under its previous policy, Google would manually demote websites in search results that it deemed as spam or violating its site reputation policy. This led to a significant drop in search rankings for legitimate news publications within the European Economic Area (EEA).
However, starting August 30, Google has announced that it will no longer apply manual search demotions under the site reputation policy within the EEA. This change is aimed at resolving regulatory scrutiny and avoiding major fines.