Defending Search users from “Parasite SEO” spam

People come to Google because they want the best, most relevant results, and they don’t want to sift through spam. Google Search’s policy against spam exists for one reason: to protect people from deceptive, low-quality content and scams – and the shady tactics that promote them.

We’ve worked together with the European Commission on a range of efforts to protect European consumers, including working to fight scams under the Digital Services Act. Unfortunately, the investigation announced today into our anti-spam efforts is misguided and risks harming millions of European users. And the investigation is without merit: a German court has already dismissed a similar claim, ruling that our anti-spam policy was valid, reasonable, and applied consistently.

Google’s anti-spam policy is essential to how we fight deceptive pay-for-play tactics that degrade our results. Google Search is built to show trustworthy results, and we’re deeply concerned about any effort that would hurt the quality of our results and interfere with how we rank websites.

Why we fight site reputation abuse

Several years ago, we heard loud and clear from users that they were seeing degraded and spammy search results, due to a growing trend of “parasite SEO” (also known as “site reputation abuse”). Here’s how it works: A spammer may pay a publisher to show its content and links on the publisher’s website, taking advantage of the publisher’s good ranking in an effort to trick users into clicking on low-quality content.

For example, a scammy payday loan site might pay a respected website to publish its content, including links to its offerings. We consider this to be spam, because both our users and our systems think they’re dealing with a trusted website, when in reality they’re dealing with a scammer. This practice comes in many flavors, but the essence is always the same: a pay-to-play scheme designed to fool our ranking systems and users.

So in March 2024, we updated our anti-spam policy based on a longstanding principle: A site can’t pay or use deceptive measures to improve its ranking in Search. If we allowed this behavior — letting sites use sketchy tactics to boost their ranking, instead of investing in creating high-quality content — it would enable bad actors to displace sites that don’t use those spammy tactics, and it would degrade Search for everyone.

Our anti-spam policy helps level the playing field, so that websites using deceptive tactics don’t outrank websites competing on the merits with their own content. We’ve heard from many of these smaller creators that they support our work to fight parasite SEO.

We take the quality of our results and our work to fight spam in Search extremely seriously. We enforce our anti-spam policy through a fair and rigorous review process, including a path for appeal.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is already making Search less helpful for European businesses and users. This surprising new investigation risks rewarding bad actors and degrading the quality of search results. European users deserve better, and we’ll continue to defend the policies that let people trust the results they see in Search.