Alphabet's Google altered its "site reputation abuse" policy in the European Economic Area (EEA) to avoid potential antitrust fines from the European Commission.
Publishers had complained the policy, designed to combat low-quality "parasite SEO," unfairly penalized their sites for hosting legitimate third-party commercial content. This led to demoted search rankings.
Effective August 30, 2026, Google will no longer apply manual penalties for this type of abuse to search results within the EEA. Instead, Google may treat affected website sections as separate entities, ranking them on their own merits.
The policy remains unchanged for users outside of the EEA. This adjustment follows an investigation by the European Commission under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).