Google Revises Spam Policy in Europe Amid Antitrust Concerns
Google has changed its spam policy in Europe to avoid an antitrust fine. The company made this change after EU regulators expressed concerns that the policy unfairly penalized news media and other publishers' websites. According to Google, from August 30, any manual actions taken to demote sites will not apply to users in the 27 EU nations, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein.
The European Commission had launched an investigation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) after publishers complained about Google's site reputation abuse policy. This policy targets the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site's ranking signals, commonly referred to as parasite SEO.
The EU said that its monitoring showed that Google's spam policy demoted news media and other publishers' websites and content in Google search results when those websites include content from commercial partners. The Commission will now monitor the application of the new policy to ensure it is compliant with the DMA, which can impose fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover on companies that breach its rules.