Alphabet’s on Friday changed its spam policy in Europe following concerns from EU regulators that could have resulted in an antitrust fine, Reuters reported. Breaches of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) can attract fines of up to 10% of a company’s global annual turnover.
The US tech giant came under scrutiny after publishers complained about its site reputation abuse policy, which targets the practice of publishing third-party pages on a website to exploit the host site’s ranking signals and influence search rankings. The practice is commonly known as parasite SEO.
What are EU’s concerns
The said its monitoring found that Google’s spam policy could demote news media and other publishers’ websites and content in Google Search when those websites included content from commercial partners.
Google said that from August 30, manual actions taken to demote websites under the policy would not apply to users in the 27 EU countries, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, which together form the European Economic Area.
The company added that the policy would remain unchanged outside the European Economic Area.
EU welcomes change
The European Commission welcomed the change. Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said the repeal addressed concerns that publishers and other business users of Google Search had been unfairly penalised.
“Thanks to the DMA, Google Search will no longer demote press publications solely for hosting third-party content,” Regnier said.
The , which serves as the EU’s competition enforcer, had opened an investigation under the DMA over concerns surrounding the policy.
Regnier said the Commission would now monitor the application of Google’s revised policy to ensure that it complies with the DMA.