Google changes spam policy in EU to avert antitrust fine

Alphabet's Google on Friday said ​it had changed its ​spam policy in Europe ‌to address ​EU concerns that could have resulted in an antitrust fine. The U.S. tech giant ‌found itself in EU regulators' crosshairs after publishers complained about its site reputation abuse policy.

It 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.

Google said that from August 30 any manual actions taken to demote ​sites would not apply to users in the 27 ⁠EU nations, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein (the European Economic Area). The policy would not change ⁠outside ​the European Economic Area, it added.

Concerns about the policy had prompted the European Commission, which acts as the EU competition ⁠enforcer, to open an investigation under the Digital Markets Act, which aims ⁠to rein ⁠in the power of Big Tech. DMA breaches can cost companies fines of up to 10% of their ‌global ‌annual turnover.