DMA pressures Google to change spam policy in the EU
News outlets and publishers can’t become collateral damage of Google’s anti-spam policy.
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- Google will stop applying manual demotions under its site reputation abuse policy to users in the EEA.
- The European Commission investigated whether the policy unfairly harmed news publishers and their business options.
- Google says affected site sections may rank separately over time instead of lowering the whole site.
- The change applies only in the EEA; sites may still rank lower elsewhere if they violate the policy.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
Google is going to change its spam policy in the European Economic Area (EEA) to avoid a fine under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
More specifically, the Mountain View-based tech company is revising its site reputation abuse policy.
This policy was implemented in 2024 to prevent websites from engaging in parasite search engine optimization (SEO).
What this means is that websites publish content from third-party sites with a trustworthy and reputable domain authority and SEO reputation to achieve a higher ranking in Google’s search engine results page (SERP).
In a way, this is an attempt to abuse Google’s search rankings by benefiting from the strong ranking of the website hosting the content.
The European Commission was concerned that this policy would negatively impact news media websites and other publishers.
Therefore, in November 2025, the EU executive branch announced it would investigate whether Google’s demotions of publishers’ websites and content in Google Search could affect publishers’ freedom to conduct legitimate business, innovate, and cooperate with third-party content providers.
“We are concerned that Google’s policies do not allow news publishers to be treated in a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory manner in its search results. We will investigate to ensure that news publishers are not losing out on important revenues at a difficult time for the industry, and to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets Act,” Teresa Ribera, Executive Vice-President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, said in a statement at the time.
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In a recently published blog post, Google says that, as of August 30th, any manual actions taken to demote sites will not apply to users in the EEA.
“The affected section of the site may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site,” the tech company explains.
The European Commission is happy with Google’s decision to alter its site reputation abuse policy.
“We welcome the repeal of this policy, which unfairly penalized publishers and other business users of Google Search. Thanks to the DMA, Google Search will no longer demote press publications solely for hosting third-party content. The Commission will now monitor the application of the new policy to ensure it is compliant with the DMA,” a spokesperson told Reuters.
Outside the EEA, nothing will change to Google’s anti-spam rules. This means that European websites that violate Google’s site reputation abuse policy may be ranked lower in Google’s SERP in other countries.
