A sponsored section on a European news site can no longer be knocked down in Google Search by a manual action under the site reputation abuse policy, at least for people searching from Europe. Google said Friday that starting Aug. 30 those penalties stop applying to users in the European Economic Area, while the policy stays in force everywhere else.
The change follows a Digital Markets Act investigation the European Commission opened in November 2025 into whether the policy treated news publishers fairly. In a Search Central post, Google said it was adjusting enforcement in the EEA “following discussion with the European Commission” and clarifying the criteria it considers when applying the policy.
Two rulebooks for one page
Introduced in March 2024, the policy targets what the industry calls parasite SEO: third-party content placed on a trusted domain so it can borrow that site’s reputation to rank. Outside the EEA, a manual action still directly affects search results for the part of the site involved, and “as before, the rest of the site won’t be affected,” Google wrote.
Inside the EEA, “the impact of the manual action won’t apply.” Instead, the affected section “may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site.” Because pages are viewed globally, the same page can carry a manual action that only affects results shown outside Europe. Site owners will still be notified in Search Console, can request reconsideration, and eligible sites can then take disputes to mediation.
Google didn’t hide its reservations. It said it remains concerned that “an overbroad application of the DMA could prevent us from addressing real threats to the integrity of our search results.” A spokesperson told Reuters, “Our priority is to keep Search results helpful and useful for users and protect them from deceptive practices like ‘parasite SEO’ spam that undermine the web,” The Next Web reported.
How Brussels got here
Publishers argued that sponsored sections, affiliate reviews and commercial partnerships are ordinary revenue for a news organization and that a manual demotion could wipe one out almost overnight. When the probe opened, competition chief Teresa Ribera said the Commission would make sure news publishers were “not losing out on important revenues at a difficult time for the industry,” while Google’s Pandu Nayak said the investigation “risks rewarding bad actors and degrading the quality of search results,” Brussels Signal reported. Google offered remedies in May, which Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier called “not strong enough.”
This time Regnier was positive. “We welcome the repeal of this policy, which unfairly penalised publishers and other business users of Google Search,” he said, as quoted by Reuters, adding that the Commission would monitor how the new approach is applied. A DMA breach can bring fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover.
The carve-out covers manual actions only, not the algorithmic ranking systems that do most of the day-to-day work, so publishers’ sponsored sections in Europe will still have to rank on their own merits.
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