Overview
- Google said on Friday that starting August 30 manual actions that demote sites will not apply to users in the 27 EU states plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, creating a Europe‑only carve‑out for site‑reputation enforcement.
- The change follows complaints from publishers and EU monitoring that showed Google’s site reputation abuse policy sometimes lowered search visibility for news and publisher pages when those pages included third‑party commercial content.
- The policy shift covers only manual demotions and applies inside the EEA; Google keeps its global spam rules and algorithmic enforcement in place outside that region.
- The European Commission has opened a Digital Markets Act probe into the issue and can levy fines of up to 10% of a company’s global turnover, so regulatory risk for Google remains active.
- For publishers the immediate effect could be restored search visibility for pages with partner or affiliate content, and the case signals that DMA enforcement can force platform rule changes that affect how dominant tech firms police spam and site partnerships.