Google Scraps Search Ranking Penalties for Publishers After EU Pressure

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

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’s reputation to rank higher in search, which hurts search quality a degrades the user experience, according to the post.

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

Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for clean, just and competitive transition at the European Commission, said in the release that the Commission’s investigation aimed to ensure that Google did not unfairly restrict businesses from promoting their own products and services.

“We are concerned that Google’s policies do not allow news publishers to be treated in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory manner in its search results,” Ribera said.

It was reported in May that publishers had criticized Google’s policy.

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, or determinations that pages on a website are not compliant with Google’s spam polices, will no longer affect the pages’ search results for users inside the EEA.

“The affected section of the site may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site,” Google said in the post.

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.

Google said of the adjustment to its enforcement inside the EEA: “While 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.”

European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told Reuters in a report published Friday: “We welcome the repeal of this policy, which unfairly penalized publishers and other business users of Google Search.”

Regnier said the Commission will monitor Google’s application of the new policy.