European Union (EU) regulators expressed concerns about Google’s third-party content policies and the effects the new changes to the spam policy will have on publishers, prompting the company to update its policy in Europe. The shift is towards Google‘s site reputation abuse policy, which has been applied to penalise sites that place external commercial content on its pages in order to gain the search ranking benefits of the host site. News publishers and other companies have raised specific concerns about the policy, which they say could have a negative impact on “legitimate” sites just because they collaborate with commercial partners.
Alphabet’s Google announced the change on Aug. 28, claiming the updated plan would take into account concerns raised by European authorities. The company has already been in hot water after publishers protested that Google’s new “site reputation abuse” policy might lead to a downgrade of a publisher’s sites and content when it was created or provided by another party.
The policy is designed to address a problem referred to as “parasite SEO. This happens when third party pages are embedded on a website that has high search authority like a blog to gain from the host site’s ranking signals. The technique can be employed to boost the visibility of a commercial page, promotional message or any content in search engine results pages above it otherwise would be.
Originally, Google created this policy to ensure the quality of their search results as they believed that websites that could artificially boost their ranking with their reputation would not be of good quality. But the European Commission had its worries about the application of the policy. The policy could also impact legitimate publishers and media companies that feature third-party material as part of their legitimate commercial activities, regulators found.
The European Union’s monitoring revealed that Google’s enforcement system might disadvantage news media and other publishers in search listings if they rely on commercial partners for website content. This created a concern as a publisher might be penalized if they had a legitimate offer for the third-party content but it was not ranked with the intent to manipulate Google’s ranking system.
The new strategy by Google will be adopted only in the EEA area. Manual actions under the relevant policy won’t be used to demote impacted websites for users in the 27 European Union member states and the Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, starting August 30. Google has also confirmed that this change only affects this region, and that outside the European Economic Area, the policy won’t change.
Google’s response was welcomed by the European Commission. EU Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier stated that the removal of the policy was “good news for anyone who was unfairly affected by it, who is a publisher or other business user of Google Search. His message comes from the Commission’s own viewpoint that websites should not to be “disincluded” from Google Search simply because they are published by third parties.
The change was also attributed directly to the European Union’s ambitious plan to rein in big tech firms. “With the introduction of the DMA, Google Search will no longer be de-prioritizing press publications just because they host third-party content,” he said, explaining that the Digital Markets Act would work to change this. The Commission will now track the implementation of the new policy to make sure that it complies with the DMA,” he said.
Among other key European Union laws addressing the market power of big tech firms is the Digital Markets Act, or DMA. It sets out rules to make digital markets more competitive and ensures that dominant platforms do not take unfair advantage of business and consumers.
European regulators have given particular attention to Google’s search business due to its far-reaching power in the way websites are seen and driven to the web. For publishers, SEO can directly impact the number of visitors to their sites, number of ads served, and commercial opportunities. A major drop in ranking can thus have repercussions outside of a site’s rank on a search engine’s results page.
The controversy about site reputation abuse illustrates the delicate tradeoff between search manipulation and the protection of good publishers. Google should not allow websites to use established authority to market low quality or non-relevant content. Meanwhile, publishers often collaborate with third-party content providers and commercial partner on the other side, which can make it hard to discern what’s legitimate third-party publishing from what’s more of an intentional search manipulation tactic.
With the shift in the publishing models of the internet, this separation has become more relevant. Established websites, such as large media companies, may be engaged in complex commercial arrangements with sponsored content, partnerships, licences and externally produced content. So a good-faith effort to avoid abuse may end up generating adverse effects when it equates all third-party content with abuse.
It’s another sign that Google’s search policies are evolving under the microscope of the EU. It has been under price pressure in Europe in the past due to competition, advertising, data policies and its relationship with other businesses. The new development underscores the fact that the way a website’s results rank in search results can be affected by how the company is regulated, not just by its operations.
