Starting August 30, 2026, Google's manual actions under its site reputation abuse policy will no longer affect search results for users in the European Economic Area. Outside the EEA, nothing changes. Google published the official announcement on August 28 on the Google Search Central Blog — "Update to the Site Reputation Policy".
What's actually changing
Site reputation abuse is Google's policy against so-called "parasite SEO" — when an established site hosts someone else's commercial content (affiliate articles, reviews, promotional landing pages) so that content can borrow the host's ranking authority. The penalty has been a manual demotion of the affected section in search results.
Now that penalty behaves differently depending on where the searcher is:
- Outside the EEA, a manual action still directly demotes the affected part of the site, exactly as before.
- Inside the EEA, there's no direct demotion anymore. The affected section may still be classified separately from the main domain and ranked against content of the same nature — Google's own example is casino content competing against other casino content, rather than against the rest of the site.
Site owners will still be notified through Search Console, and the reconsideration request process hasn't gone anywhere.
Where the pressure came from
The policy was introduced with the March 2024 core update and started being enforced in Europe in January 2025. Complaints followed quickly: publishers, including the European Publishers Council, argued that ordinary news outlets were getting penalized for monetizing articles through affiliate links and advertising — a standard media practice, not spam. The European Commission opened an investigation under the Digital Markets Act, the law that requires "gatekeepers" like Google not to obstruct competitors and partners on a level playing field.
Google's statement didn't pretend to fully agree: the company reiterated that it considers the policy necessary for search quality and added that an overly broad application of the DMA risks preventing it from fighting real spam. It made the concession anyway.
This isn't the first time DMA pressure has forced changes to Search in Europe. Earlier this summer, the European Commission fined Google a record amount over self-preferencing of its own services — Google Shopping, Flights, Hotels — in results, and issued binding requirements on giving competitors access to search data and AI features. DMA fines can reach up to 10% of a company's global annual revenue.
Who this matters to
Mainly sites in the EEA that earn money through affiliate programs and sponsored content — they now face less risk of a sudden traffic drop from a manual action. It's also the first time Google has officially acknowledged that the same anti-spam policy now works differently depending on the searcher's region — until now, the company insisted its rules were the same everywhere.
