Published on September 4, 2026 · The mitza.es team
Google has quietly softened one of its spam-fighting mechanisms, and it's done so only for Europe. Since August 30, 2026, the company has stopped enforcing manual actions under its "site reputation abuse" policy for users in the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes Spain. The change follows a European Commission investigation into whether this policy was, in practice, unfairly harming legitimate publishers and media outlets. It's an unusual case where European competition law directly reshapes how Google Search ranking actually works.
What "site reputation abuse" is (and why Google enforces it)
The site reputation abuse policy, better known in the industry as "parasite SEO", targets a very specific practice: a third-party company publishes content on a large, high-authority domain — a well-known news outlet, a comparison site, or an established portal — with the sole purpose of borrowing that domain's trust signal, rather than earning rankings through the merit of its own content. The classic example is a "coupons", "online casino" or "loan comparison" section hosted inside a major newspaper, which pays for that piece of real estate on the domain and ranks far higher than it ever would on its own website. Google began enforcing this policy in Europe in January 2025, specifically to curb that kind of manipulation.
The European Commission investigation and the Digital Markets Act
The problem, as several European publishers argued, was that the policy was being applied too broadly: legitimate commercial arrangements between media outlets and brands — sponsored content sections, declared editorial partnerships — were also getting caught under the same enforcement mechanism, losing visibility disproportionately. That led the European Commission to open an investigation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), the European regulation that governs the behavior of large "gatekeeper" platforms like Google, to assess whether enforcing this policy was distorting competition by demoting legitimate publisher and media content. It's worth not confusing the DMA with the Digital Services Act (DSA) or the EU AI Act: these are three separate pieces of regulation, and this story is specifically about platform competition rules.
As a result of that pressure, a Google spokesperson confirmed the change with a short but clear statement: "we've agreed to make changes to our enforcement approach for users in Europe."
What exactly changes inside the EEA as of August 30, 2026
Within the European Economic Area, manual actions for site reputation abuse no longer directly affect the rest of the domain's rankings. Instead, Google explains that flagged content "may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site" — in other words, an algorithmic isolation approach rather than a punitive demotion of the whole domain. Sites still receive the corresponding manual action notification and can still file a reconsideration request through the standard process; what's specifically changed in the EEA is the ranking-impact mechanism, not the notification process itself.
What stays the same outside the EEA
Outside Europe, nothing changes: when Google issues a manual action under this policy, that penalty continues to directly demote the affected part of the site in search results for users everywhere else in the world. The adjustment is, for now, strictly European — a direct consequence of the fact that the European Commission's investigation only has jurisdiction over how Google treats users in the EEA.
What this means (and doesn't mean) for a Spanish website
It's tempting to read this news as "parasite SEO no longer has consequences in Spain", but that reading is incorrect and risky. Google's spam guidelines haven't disappeared, and the company still has other levers — from purely algorithmic adjustments to manual actions on specific sections — to deal with this kind of content, even though the ranking-impact mechanism inside the EEA has changed. What matters here isn't that "anything goes" now, but that the European Union has demonstrated, with a very concrete case, that it can force Google to change how it weighs search rankings for its citizens. It's a trend worth watching closely alongside Google's other anti-spam updates, because there are increasing signs that European regulation will keep shaping how search works for EU users.
For any SME or publisher with a website in Spain, the underlying message remains the same as always: building real authority pays off far more in the long run than chasing shortcuts that depend on rules Google can change without warning, as this very case shows. With the traffic drop many sites are already seeing from AI Overviews, staying visible — both in traditional search and in AI-powered answer engines — requires genuine technical and content work, not just knowing which policy happens to be in force this week. That's exactly the ground we work on with our AI search engine optimization service and with SEO: helping your site rank on its own merits, sustainably, whatever the policy of the moment turns out to be.