Alphabet Holdings announced yesterday that it has changed its anti-spam policy in Europe due to concerns from EU authorities, which could result in antitrust fines.
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The U.S. tech giant has attracted the attention of European regulators over complaints that Google abused its website reputation policies. This policy is designed to combat the practice of abusing search engine results by publishing third-party pages on a website to take advantage of the main website’s ranking signals – a scheme commonly known as parasitic SEO. However, monitoring by EU authorities has shown that Google’s anti-spam policies can lower the ranking of news media and other publications in search results if their content contains content from commercial partners.
Starting August 30, Google will no longer manually downgrade websites in the 27 EU countries, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein (members of the European Economic Area). Policies outside the European Economic Area will remain unchanged. “We welcome the reversal of this policy, which unfairly penalized publishers and other business users of Google.”said European Commission spokesman Thomas Rainier. Concerns about the policy prompted the European Commission, the EU’s antitrust regulator, to launch an investigation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is aimed at curbing the dominance of big tech companies. Violations of this regulation may result in fines of up to 10% of annual global turnover.
“As a result of the Digital Markets Act, Google Search will no longer downgrade news publications simply for hosting third-party content. The Commission will now oversee the implementation of the new policy to ensure it complies with the Digital Markets Act.””, added Mr Rainier.
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