Google’s site reputation harms thousands of publishers across Europe, depriving them of crucial revenues and undermining the access of citizens to reliable and independent news stories.
Citizens come to news publishers because they want the best, most relevant independent reporting, and they don’t want that to change. Google Search’s aggressive site reputation abuse policy exists for one reason: to protect Google’s own ranking systems, while masquerading this as an effort in the public interest.
We’ve worked together with the European Commission on a range of efforts to protect European news publishers from big tech, including working to fight unfair commercial practices under the Digital Markets Act. Finally, the investigation announced today into Google’s site reputation policy recognises the scale of this problem. The policy risks harming citizens by degrading the financial viability of diverse news sources.
If Google’s anti-spam policy was really designed to fight deceptive pay-for-play tactics, and to promote trustworthy results in Google Search, Google should be promoting and not demoting professional news publishers to improve the quality of results and how websites are ranked.
Why Google’s Policy Harms the Site Reputation of News Publishers
Several years ago, publishers recognized that a growing digital revenue crisis was threatening the financial health of the press. This was driven by a need to find alternative revenue streams (also known as content syndication or sponsored posts). Here’s how this works: A struggling publisher may agree to host a third party’s content, including links, on the publisher’s website, taking advantage of the publisher’s existing audience and traffic in an effort to secure funding for core editorial operations.
For example, a respected local newspaper might secure a sponsored placement from a brand or affiliate marketer to publish their content, including links to their offerings. Google now considers this to be spam, because its users and its systems think they’re dealing with a trusted website, when in reality the publisher is attempting to monetise its reputation to fund its essential public service. This practice comes in many flavors, but the essence is always the same: a legitimate commercial agreement designed to keep the presses rolling.
So, when Google updated its anti-spam policy in March 2024, it based it on a damaging principle: A site can’t be paid for or use commercial measures to improve its ranking in Search. If we allow this overly strict interpretation – letting Google dictate monetization tactics instead of letting sites invest in creating high-quality, independent content – it would enable dominant platforms to displace publishers that rely on these revenue streams, and it would degrade the access to diverse news for everyone.
Our argument is that Google’s anti-spam policy disrupts the level playing field, so that websites using legitimate monetisation tactics are outranked by sites competing on the merits with their own deep pockets. We’ve heard from many of these smaller creators and publishers that they fear Google’s work to fight “site reputation abuse”.
We take the quality of independent reporting and our work to sustain news in Europe extremely seriously. Google is enforcing its anti-spam policy through an opaque, algorithmic process that has an unacceptable cost to journalism.
The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is already seeking to make Search fairer for European businesses and users. This new investigation is vital because the failure to act risks harming the press and degrading the quality of news citizens can access. European users deserve better, and we’ll continue to defend the publishers that let people trust the independence of the results they see in their news feeds.
Contact: Iacob Gammeltoft