Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google said on Friday that it had changed its spam policy in Europe in response to concerns raised by European Union regulators, potentially addressing an issue that could have resulted in an antitrust fine.

The scrutiny followed complaints from publishers about Google’s site reputation abuse policy, which targets attempts to manipulate search rankings by publishing third-party pages on established websites and benefiting from the host site’s ranking signals. The practice is commonly known as parasite SEO.

EU raised concerns over impact on publishers

EU monitoring found that Google’s policy resulted in news organisations and other publishers having their websites and content demoted in Google search results when their sites included material from commercial partners.

The European Commission, which acts as the EU’s competition regulator, subsequently opened an investigation under the Digital Markets Act.

Google said that from August 30, manual actions taken to demote websites under the policy would no longer apply to users in the 27 EU member states, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, which together form the European Economic Area.

The company said its policy would remain unchanged outside the European Economic Area.

European Commission welcomes policy change

“We welcome the repeal of this policy, which unfairly penalised publishers and other business users of Google Search,” European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said.

The Commission’s investigation was launched under the Digital Markets Act, legislation intended to regulate certain practices of large technology platforms.

“Thanks to the DMA, Google Search will no longer demote press publications solely for hosting third-party content,” Regnier said.

“The Commission will now monitor the application of the new policy to ensure it is compliant with the DMA.”

Google remains subject to EU monitoring

The policy change addresses the specific concerns raised over the treatment of publishers hosting third-party commercial content, although the European Commission will continue monitoring how Google implements the revised approach.

Under the Digital Markets Act, companies found to have breached the rules can face fines of up to 10% of their global annual turnover.

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