{"id":1174405,"date":"2026-08-28T16:09:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T16:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1174405\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T16:09:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T16:09:31","slug":"google-scraps-search-ranking-penalties-after-eu-pressure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1174405\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Scraps Search Ranking Penalties After EU Pressure"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google<\/a> has adjusted its site reputation policy in the European Economic Area (EEA) after discussion with the European Commission<\/a>, the company said in a Friday (Aug. 28) blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Google introduced the policy in 2024 to stop a practice in which third-party content is published on a trusted website to use that website\u2019s reputation to rank higher in search, which hurts search quality a degrades the user experience, according to the post.<\/p>\n

The European Commission said in a November 2025 press release<\/a> that it opened an investigation into Google\u2019s policy because the policy may breach the European Union\u2019s Digital Markets Act<\/a> (DMA) by demoting news media and other publishers\u2019 content in search results because they contain content from the publishers\u2019 commercial partners.<\/p>\n

Teresa Ribera<\/a>, executive vice-president for clean, just and competitive transition at the European Commission, said in the release that the Commission\u2019s investigation aimed to ensure that Google did not unfairly restrict businesses from promoting their own products and services.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are concerned that Google\u2019s policies do not allow news publishers to be treated in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory manner in its search results,\u201d Ribera said.<\/p>\n

\"Preferred<\/p>\n

We\u2019d love to be your preferred source for news<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!<\/p>\n

It was reported in May that publishers<\/a> had criticized Google\u2019s policy.<\/p>\n

Google said in its Friday blog post that following discussion with the European Commission, the company has changed its enforcement of the policy so that its manual actions<\/a>, or determinations that pages on a website are not compliant with Google\u2019s spam polices<\/a>, will no longer affect the pages\u2019 search results for users inside the EEA.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe affected section of the site may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site,\u201d Google said in the post.<\/p>\n

This change will not affect users outside the EEA. For them, manual actions will still directly impact search results for the relevant portion of the site, according to the post.<\/p>\n

Google said of the adjustment to its enforcement inside the EEA: \u201cWhile we remained concerned that an overbroad application of the DMA could prevent us from addressing real threats to the integrity of our search results, we believe this approach enables us to combat attempts to manipulate search results for our users.\u201d<\/p>\n

European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier<\/a> told Reuters in a report<\/a> published Friday: \u201cWe welcome the repeal of this policy, which unfairly penalized publishers and other business users of Google Search.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regnier said the Commission will monitor Google\u2019s application of the new policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google has adjusted its site reputation policy in the European Economic Area (EEA) after discussion with the European…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1174406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187,2557,1699,867,2452,12,3279,8948,3281],"class_list":["post-1174405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-european","tag-european-commission","tag-european-union","tag-google","tag-media","tag-news","tag-pymnts-news","tag-regulations","tag-whats-hot"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1174405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1174406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1174405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1174405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1174405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}