Google adjusts spam policies in European region

Google has adjusted its policies regarding spam in the European region after being highlighted by European Union regulators, following complaints from several digital publishers regarding the enforcement of the company’s site reputation policies.

According to reports from the Times of India on Friday (28/8), publisher complaints related to the application of Google’s site reputation policy, which aims to stop third-party practices where content is placed on established websites to exploit the strong search rankings of the parent site.

EU authorities took action after monitoring revealed that Google’s anti-spam policies were lowering the rankings of websites and content belonging to news media and other publishers in Google search results if those sites hosted content from commercial partners.

In response to concerns from EU authorities, Google stated that starting 30 August 2026, any manual actions to demote sites will not be applied to users of its services within the European Economic Area, which includes the 27 EU member states, Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein.

The European Commission has welcomed the policy change and stated it will monitor its implementation.

Google’s anti-spam policy changes do not extend to countries outside the European Economic Area.

Google implements spam policies in an effort to help protect users and improve the quality of search results.

On its support pages, the company states that to appear in Google Web Search results, content must not violate Google Search’s general policies or its spam policies.

The company detects policy-violating practices through automated systems and human review if necessary, which can lead to manual actions.

According to the company, websites found to be violating policies may receive lower rankings in search results or may not appear at all.