Report from Bloomberg
In Brief – Google has reportedly made a proposal to European Commission digital regulators to change their search engine’s anti-spam policy to downrank news publisher websites that engage in a practice dubbed “parasite SEO”. The move comes in response to the Commission’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) investigation of Google’s “site reputation abuse policy” that penalizes publisher websites when the established site sells pages to third parties and allow them to publish their own content on a branch of the publisher’s main site so that the third-party page does better in Google’s search algorithm by riding on the host site’s established search ranking. Google has defended the policy as an effort to improve user experiences by deterring a deceptive commercial practice. Last November, DMA regulators said that the anti-spam policy impacts a “common and legitimate way for publishers to monetize their websites”. Although the specific changes offered by Google have not been made public, the company said it is “continuing to engage constructively” with the European Commission and that they are trying to protect their users from “deceptive practices like ‘parasite SEO’ spam that undermine the web.”
Context – The “fairness” of Google search results has been an unending morass for decades. Every algorithm change benefits some websites while others feel aggrieved. The Digital Markets Act now regulates the largest digital platforms, including Google search. It’s complicated with competing interests besides Google. For example, DMA regulators have spent over two years pressing Google to change search to mollify specialized “vertical search” aggregators for services like flights and hotels without overly angering hotel chains and airlines who want high rankings too. Google argues that search is a complex black box intended to benefit users and that too much transparency breeds abuse. What this anti-spam dispute really illustrates is that the EU regulators are comfortable getting into the mix on highly technical disputes about user experience and how search operates. And “parasite SEO” is nothing compared to publisher concerns over AI in search.