From August 30, 2026, Google will stop applying its ” site reputation abuse ” sanctions (the well-known parasite SEO) to sites that appear in search results for users in the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes France. The announcement, confirmed on August 28 by Google itself on its official developers blog, marks a clear retreat from a policy applied without exception elsewhere in the world since its launch in 2024.
What is “parasite SEO”?
site reputation abuse refers to a practice where a third-party site publishes low-quality content, often sponsored, on a high-authority domain (major media outlet, institution, well-known e-commerce site) solely to leverage its reputation to rank better on Google. A typical example: a “credit deals” section or an “online casino comparison” hosted on the subdomain of a major newspaper, with no real editorial link to the newsroom. Google had introduced a specific manual penalty against this practice during its March 2024 core update, in addition to the sanctions already applied to automatically generated content.
What changes concretely from August 30
For users located in the EEA, a manual action taken under this policy will no longer have any effect on the ranking of the pages concerned. For all users located outside the EEA, however, the sanction continues to apply in full, with a demotion or deindexing of the offending section. The same site can therefore be penalized in Canada or the United Kingdom while retaining a normal ranking in France or Germany.
Google specifies that affected sites will continue to be notified via Search Console of the existence of a manual action, and that its automated ranking systems may still treat a sponsored section of a domain separately from the rest of the domain. Only the manual action, however, stops producing a visible effect for European users.
Why Google retreats in Europe
The change follows an investigation opened in November 2025 by the European Commission under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Several news publishers had complained that the application of this policy unfairly penalized their commercial or partner content sections, even though this type of partnership remains an important source of revenue for the press. Under pressure from Brussels, Google chose to adjust its systems rather than risk a fine under the DMA, which can reach 10% of the group's global turnover.
What this changes for French sites
- Publishers hosting sections of sponsored content or commercial partnerships gain leeway they had not had since 2024.
- Competition between these sections and independent specialized sites could again evolve, notably on competitive topics like credit or gambling.
- This shift adds to an already eventful SEO context this year, between Google's Spam Update and the rise of GEO, SEO designed for search engines by AI.
That said, the perceived reliability of search results could suffer: as our recent article on the renewed prominence of human-written content compared with AI reminded, European users remain attentive to the editorial quality of the pages they consult, whether sponsored or not.
To follow all the development, webmarketing & SEO news or more broadly the web trends, DirectMag continues to cover these developments as they unfold.
Frequently asked questions
What is a manual action at Google?
It is a sanction applied manually by a human reviewer at Google, after detecting a practice deemed contrary to the webmaster guidelines, as opposed to penalties generated automatically by ranking algorithms.
Does this measure only affect major media outlets?
No. It applies to any site that hosts third-party content benefiting from its reputation, which can also concern e-commerce sites, comparison sites or community platforms, provided a sponsored section is integrated there.
Are sites outside the European Union affected by this easing?
No, the measure only applies to results shown to users located in the European Economic Area. Everywhere else, the “site reputation abuse” policy continues to apply unchanged.
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This article was written with the help of artificial intelligence. Editorial policy
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