What you need to know
- The European Commission is looking into whether Google's anti-spam policies in Search violate the Digital Markets Act.
- Publishers complained to the EU that Google's rules resulted in decreased revenue, so it opened an investigation.
- Google said the investigation is "misguided" and it "risks harming millions of European users."
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The European Union hit Google with an antitrust investigation on Thursday, Nov. 13, regarding its anti-spam policies in Search, as reported by Reuters. The inquiry falls under the Digital Markets Act, and comes after publishers complained that the search engine practices resulted in decreased revenue. Google, on the other hand, claims that it is fighting a technique called "parasite SEO" to improve search results for users.
"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," said Teresa Ribera, who is the EU's antitrust chief, in a statement to Reuters. "We will investigate to ensure that news publishers are not losing out on important revenues at a difficult time for the industry, and to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets Act (DMA)."
Google explains that parasite SEO, also known as site reputation abuse, puts users at risk and tries to thwart the brand's search algorithms. Spammers offer to publish content on sites with good reputations so that they rank higher in search results, according to the company. This can end up causing low-quality or scam content to appear higher in Google Search results than they typically would.
We’ve worked together with the European Commission on a range of efforts to protect European consumers, including working to fight scams under the Digital Services Act. Unfortunately, the investigation announced today into our anti-spam efforts is misguided and risks harming millions of European users. And the investigation is without merit: a German court has already dismissed a similar claim, ruling that our anti-spam policy was valid, reasonable, and applied consistently.
Pandu Nayak, Chief Scientist of Search at Google
The anti-spam policies de-rank content that tries to improve its standings by paying brands or using deceptive measures, a Google blog post explains. Google also claims the anti-spam measures help sites that don't use these misleading and "spammy" tactics. It ensures that parasite SEO results don't appear higher in search results than "websites competing on the merits with their own content."
"Google’s anti-spam policy is essential to how we fight deceptive pay-for-play tactics that degrade our results," writes Nayak in the blog post. "Google Search is built to show trustworthy results, and we’re deeply concerned about any effort that would hurt the quality of our results and interfere with how we rank websites."
What happens next?
The EU's European Commission will now investigate whether Google's anti-spam policies violate the DMA. Violations are costly for large tech companies, as the EU can impose fines of up to 10% of their annual global revenue for breaking the rules.
