From Sunday, a European news publisher that runs sponsored content on its site will no longer be at risk of a manual demotion in Google Search. Google confirmed the change on Friday, and Reuters reported that it is designed to settle a European Commission investigation that could otherwise have ended in a fine.
The company said manual actions demoting sites would stop applying to users in the 27 EU countries, along with Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, from 30 August. The policy itself is unchanged in the rest of the world, which means the same page can now rank differently depending on where the person searching happens to be sitting.
At issue is Google’s site reputation abuse policy, introduced in March 2024 and widened in November. It targets what the search industry calls parasite SEO, the practice of parking third-party content on an established domain so that the content inherits the host’s authority in search results.
Publishers have argued for the better part of two years that the enforcement caught the wrong people. Sponsored sections, affiliate reviews and commercial partnerships are ordinary revenue lines for a news organisation, and a manual demotion could remove one of them from search almost overnight.
