Google won’t respect manual actions for site reputation abuse in European Economic Area

Google’s site reputation abuse manual action will no longer impact the search results in the European Economic Area (EEA) starting August 30, 2026. This is in response to the European Commission’s investigation over the site reputation abuse policy and its requiring Google to adjust its systems for that policy not to be enforced within the EEA.

What is changing. On August 30th, manual actions applied under Google’s site reputation policy will have different effects for those searching in the EEA than for those outside it. This is how it will differ, says Google:

• For users outside the EEA, a manual action regarding Google’s site reputation policy will directly affect search results for the portion of the site affected. As before, the rest of the site won’t be affected.
• For users inside the EEA, the impact of the manual action will not apply. The affected section of the site may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site.

It seems like Google’s site reputation abuse manual actions won’t specifically apply within the EEA but its systems for treating the portion of the site that hosts third-party content as a “parasite SEO” strategy will be treated as its own site and not as part of the existing site. The concept of Google treating sections of a site as its own site is not new to Google’s site reputation abuse spam prevention, and that still seems to be happening in the EEA regions. But manual actions over site reputation abuse will not apply in the EEA regions.

What Google said. A Google spokesperson told us:

“Our European users are no less frustrated by parasite SEO and other deceptive, pay-to-play tactics that degrade search results, and we stand by our Site Reputation Policy. While we remain concerned about efforts to weaken our spam policies, we’ve agreed to make changes to our enforcement approach for users in Europe and clarify our policies to address the European Commission’s concerns.”

More details. In March 2024, Google released the March 2024 core update, along with several spam policies including the new site reputation abuse policy. Google’s anti-spam policies are essential to how Google fights deceptive pay-for-play tactics, aka “parasite SEO,” that can degrade Google’s search results.

The adjustment Google announced specifically applies to how Google handles manual actions under the Site Reputation Policy (SRAP) for search results displayed to users inside the European Economic Area (EEA). Google is not pausing or weakening its core spam enforcement in Europe.

Manual action notifications will still be sent to sites based in the EEA region over site reputation abuse but those penalties will not impact the site’s placement in Google’s search results for searchers within the EEA region. It will affect what searchers see outside the EEA.

Google wrote, “Site owners will continue to be notified within Search Console when a manual action is applied. If you believe an action was taken in error, you can submit a reconsideration request. Eligible sites will, following the reconsideration request, also have the opportunity to bring disputes to mediation. Because many pages are viewed by people globally, it’s possible that any given page might have a manual action taken on it, but that change will only affect search results shown to users outside the EEA.”

Why we care.

If your website or client’s site has a site reputation abuse manual action and it gets Google search traffic from searchers in the EEA region, than you might notice even more traffic after this rolls out.

It is still recommended that if you want to rank well outside of the EEA, you do not violate the site reputation abuse policy.

I am a bit surprised that Google actually is changing how it handles a spam policy based on the region of the searcher but I guess Google decided it has no other choice.