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People come to Google because they want the best, most relevant results, and they don\u2019t want to sift through spam. Google Search\u2019s policy against spam exists for one reason: to protect people from deceptive, low-quality content and scams \u2013 and the shady tactics that promote them.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
Google\u2019s 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\u2019re deeply concerned about any effort that would hurt the quality of our results and interfere with how we rank websites.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cparasite SEO\u201d (also known as \u201csite reputation abuse\u201d). Here\u2019s how it works: A spammer may pay a publisher to show its content and links on the publisher\u2019s website, taking advantage of the publisher\u2019s good ranking in an effort to trick users into clicking on low-quality content.<\/p>\n
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\u2019re dealing with a trusted website, when in reality they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
So in March 2024, we updated our anti-spam policy based on a longstanding principle: A site can\u2019t pay or use deceptive measures to improve its ranking in Search. If we allowed this behavior \u2014 letting sites use sketchy tactics to boost their ranking, instead of investing in creating high-quality content \u2014 it would enable bad actors to displace sites that don\u2019t use those spammy tactics, and it would degrade Search for everyone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n