Report: EU to probe Google over site reputation abuse policy

Google parent Alphabet is expected to face a new EU investigation over claims that it demotes news publishers in search results if they run sponsored or promotional content, a significant revenue source for many media outlets.

What’s happening. The European Commission, the EU’s top antitrust enforcer, is expected to announce the probe as soon as Thursday.

• The case falls under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a law that bars tech “gatekeepers” from unfairly favoring their own services or penalizing others.
• Companies that break the rules can be fined up to 10% of their global revenue.

Site reputation abuse. Google’s enforcement against publishers is based on a spam policy introduced in March 2024 and updated in November 2024.

• The policy targets “site reputation abuse” – better known to SEOs as parasite SEO – which occurs when third parties post low-quality content on trusted sites to piggyback on their authority and manipulate Google rankings.
• Google said this kind of content can confuse or mislead users, and has taken manual action against sites hosting it.
• The company later updated the policy to state that even content created with first-party oversight can violate the rule if its main goal is to exploit a site’s ranking signals.

The report. EU readies fresh investigation into Google over news publisher rankings (registration required)