Google on 28th August announced it has updated its spam policy in Europe in response to concerns raised by EU authorities that might have led to an antitrust fine by the agency against Alphabet.

The U.S. tech giant was caught up in the crossfire of EU regulators because of its reputation abuse policy on its site and publishers’ complaints.

EXCLUSIVE: Google warns of lower quality as it revamps Europe search results to avoid EU fines https://t.co/XaiDHZZcX4 https://t.co/XaiDHZZcX4

— Reuters (@Reuters) September 8, 2026

It addresses the activity of hosting a third-party page on another website, which is done to exploit the ranking signals of the host website to trick the search engine into ranking that page high – known 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.

From August 30, any manual actions that Google has made will not apply to the EEA countries (consisting of the 27 EU countries, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein).

It did not change as long as outside the European Economic Area, the policy, it added.

The EU Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said that the repeal of this policy is “welcome, because it was an unfair burden on publishers and other business users of Google Search”.

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 because of third-party content, Regnier said.

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

The fines for a DMA violation may be as high as 10% of the global annual turnover of the company.