Google changes spam policy in EU to avert antitrust fine

According to Business Recorder, Alphabet's Google said on Friday that it had amended its spam policy for Europe to ease EU concerns that could have led to an antitrust fine. The move follows complaints from publishers about the company's site reputation abuse rule, which drew the attention of EU regulators.

The rule concerns parasite SEO, a tactic in which third-party pages are hosted on an established site to exploit its ranking signals and manipulate search results. The European Commission said its monitoring found that Google's policy pushed down news outlets and other publishers in search results whenever their sites carried content from commercial partners.

Starting August 30, Google said, manual demotions will no longer reach people in the 27 EU member states, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein. The policy will remain unchanged elsewhere, the company added. The Commission opened its investigation under the Digital Markets Act, a law designed to curb the influence of large technology platforms, and breaches can attract fines of as much as 10% of worldwide annual turnover.