Google is changing its spam policy, which penalised news organisations search rankings, in a bid to avoid a potential EU antitrust fine.
Google will stop demoting publisher sites that contain sponsored content in 30 countries across Europe, from this weekend.
The tech giant confirmed it has amended its spam policy in a bid to settle an investigation by the European Commission (EC), which could lead to a fine under the European Union’s (EU) antitrust law.
Publishers in the region raised concern’s over Google’s site reputation abuse policy, introduced in March 2024 to tackle the practice of parasite SEO. This relates to publishing third-party content on mainstream news domains in order to abuse search rankings and take advantage of the host site’s ranking signals.
They argued the policy negatively affected genuine publishers and that sponsored sections, affiliate reviews and commercial partnerships are standard revenue drivers for many news organisations. A manual demotion by Google could remove any one of them from search rankings almost overnight.
Google has now amended its policy within the European Economic Area – which includes the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein – to ensure that sites that include content from commercial partners are not manually demoted. The policy remains unchanged for the rest of the world, meaning publishers will be ranked differently depending on which market the user is searching in.
EU Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier told Reuters: “We welcome the repeal of this policy, which unfairly penalised publishers and other business users of Google Search.”
“Thanks to the DMA [Digital Markets Act], 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.”
Since Google introduced its so-called spam policy, there has been an 82% rise in the top 10 URLs dropping out of the top 100, according to SE ranking data. This equates to 16.7% of URLs dropping out of the top 100 compared to just 9.2% previously.
There was also a 12% increase in the percentage of URLs, which ranked in the top three after the update but previously had not broken into the top 20.
These changes spanned across all 20 industries the data ranked with the most volatility experienced in real estate (74.6%) and fashion (85.5%). The research indicates to all sectors were affected relatively similarly, with no particular site, content, or spam tactic affected the most.
