Google changes spam policy in EU to avoid 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 Aug. 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.

“We welcome the repeal of this policy, which unfairly penalized publishers and other business users of Google Search,” EU Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said.

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.

“Thanks to the DMA, Google Search will no longer demote press publications solely for hosting third-party content,” Regnier said.

“The Commission will now monitor the application of the new policy to ensure it is compliant with the DMA.”

DMA breaches can cost companies fines of up to 10 per cent of their global annual turnover.