Google revises spam policy in EU to avert antitrust fine

Google on Friday has announced plans to change spam policy in Europe in the midst of EU pressure to address the regulator’s concerns and avoid antitrust fines.

The US tech giant has been under fire in Europe due to its site reputation abuse policy. According to the European Commission, Google’s automated enforcement and broad application of these spam rules were inadvertently demoting web publisher content and legitimate news media by taking advantage of host site’s ranking signals, also called parasite SEO.

The publishers argued that Google’s strict penalties are responsible for harming journalistic content by stripping them of web traffic and revenue.

Speaking about the revised policy, Google announced modifications to how its spam and reputation policies are deployed across the European Economic Area (EEA) in order to avert non-compliance fines,

Starting from August 30, “any manual actions taken to demote sites would not apply to users in the 27 EU nations, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein.”

The policy ​would not ⁠change outside the European Economic Area, it added.

The changes come in the response of frameworks like the Digital Markets Act and traditional EU competition rules. In the case of non-compliance of DMA, the companies can pay fines of up to 10% of their ​global annual turnover.