EU investigating Google over site reputation abuse policy

 

The EU probe follows publisher complaints that their revenue was impacted as Google tried to eliminate parasite SEO from its search results.

Google parent Alphabet is facing a new EU investigation over claims that it demotes news publishers in search results if they run sponsored or promotional content, a significant revenue source for many media outlets.

What’s happening. The European Commission, the EU’s top antitrust enforcer, announced the probe today.

• The case falls under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a law that bars tech “gatekeepers” from unfairly favoring their own services or penalizing others.
• Companies that break the rules can be fined up to 10% of their global revenue.

Site reputation abuse. Google’s enforcement against publishers is based on a spam policy introduced in March 2024 and updated in November 2024.

• The policy targets “site reputation abuse” – better known to SEOs as parasite SEO – which occurs when third parties post low-quality content on trusted sites to piggyback on their authority and manipulate Google rankings.
• Google said this kind of content can confuse or mislead users, and has taken manual action against sites hosting it.
• The company later updated the policy to state that even content created with first-party oversight can violate the rule if its main goal is to exploit a site’s ranking signals.

Google responds. In a blog post by Pandu Nayak, Google called the investigation “misguided”:

• “Google’s anti-spam policy is essential to how we fight deceptive pay-for-play tactics that degrade our results. Google Search is built to show trustworthy results, and we’re deeply concerned about any effort that would hurt the quality of our results and interfere with how we rank websites.
• “Our anti-spam policy helps level the playing field, so that websites using deceptive tactics don’t outrank websites competing on the merits with their own content. We’ve heard from many of these smaller creators that they support our work to fight parasite SEO.
• “This surprising new investigation risks rewarding bad actors and degrading the quality of search results. European users deserve better, and we’ll continue to defend the policies that let people trust the results they see in Search.”

EC press release. Commission opens investigation into potential Digital Markets Act breach by Google in demoting media publishers’ content in search results

Google’s response. Defending Search users from “Parasite SEO” spam

First reported. EU readies fresh investigation into Google over news publisher rankings (registration required)

Editor’s note: This article was updated following the EC’s confirmation of the investigation and Google’s response