Following EU scrutiny, Google changes site-reputation-abuse enforcement in the EEA

After publisher complaints and monitoring under the Digital Markets Act, Google said on 28 August 2026 that manual demotions under its site-reputation-abuse policy will no longer affect users in the European Economic Area. The policy continues to differ outside the EEA, and the European Commission said it will keep monitoring the implementation.

The change matters because search governance is becoming jurisdiction-specific: publishers, affiliate businesses and SEO teams can no longer assume that the same page structure will get the same enforcement outcome everywhere.

In practice, rank monitoring should be split by country, commercial partnerships should be disclosed openly, and the regulatory change should not be misread as permission for low-value third-party content.