Google has a site reputation policy dedicated to preventing “parasite SEO,” where third-party content gets published on a reputable website. The purpose is to make the most of the robust reputation and authority of the website to rank high in SERPs.
Google introduced this policy back in 2024 because otherwise, parasite SEO can hamper organic search results, eventually making it a bad experience for the users.
Recently, they had a talk with the European Commission. Based on this discussion, Google has decided to enforce this policy differently in the European Economic Area or EEA.
August 30 onwards, manual actions against site reputation abuse will no longer impact EEA region users directly. However, Google may separate the abused section from the main website. Owners of the affected websites will continue to receive notifications around Google’s manual actions.
This in no way means that site reputation abuse is being normalized by Google. It only means that the policy enforcement tactics are being changed to cater to the requirements of the EEA region.
However, those sites outside the EEA region will be under the direct scrutiny of the site reputation policy.
Global SEO experts must keep in mind that there should not be any room for irrelevant third-party content just for the sake of exploiting the existing domain authority of a reputed website. A piece of content should always be useful, relevant, and offer value to match the search intent of the user.