Google Tells Sites With Reputation Abuse Penalties: EEA Results Unaffected

Google has begun emailing site owners to say that manual actions issued under its site reputation abuse policy will no longer affect search results shown to users in the European Economic Area (EEA). The change took effect on August 30, according to the notification, but Google only started alerting affected site owners roughly two months later through Google Search Console.

SEO consultant Glenn Gabe posted the email on X. It reads in full:

"New Site Reputation Policy Change: Google has recently made some changes to its site reputation policy within the EEA. For pages that were previously subject to a manual action under the site reputation policy, the previous manual action will no longer impact search results shown to users within the EEA. Click here to view the changes to the policy, and here for further information."

The email matters because it confirms, in Google's own words, a regional carve-out for one of the company's most consequential spam policies of the past two years.

What is the site reputation abuse policy?

Google introduced the site reputation abuse policy alongside its March 2024 core update. The policy targets what the industry calls "Parasite SEO" — the practice of publishing third-party promotional content on an established, high-authority domain so it rides that site's ranking strength in Google Search.

Enforcement in Europe followed later. Google began applying the site reputation abuse policy in Europe in January 2025, more than nine months after the policy's debut.

Under the policy, pages found in violation receive a manual action (a human-issued penalty applied directly to specific pages rather than an algorithmic adjustment), which can remove the offending pages from search results entirely.

Who received the emails?

Gabe reported that the notifications went out to sites with a history of site reputation abuse manual actions. He wrote:

"New site reputation abuse emails went out just now to sites that have been impacted by SRA manual actions in the past. The email explains the changes based on how sites will be handled for users in the EEA."

He added a significant detail about the recipient pool:

"Note, this seems to have gone out to sites that don't have manual actions now for SRA (although they did at some point in the past)."

That second point widens the audience. Sites that already resolved or removed their penalties, not just those with active manual actions, appear to be part of this notification round. For any publisher that cleaned up third-party content after a past penalty, the email serves as confirmation that the EEA carve-out applies to their history as well.

What does this change for site owners?

The practical effect splits by geography. Pages carrying a site reputation abuse manual action — past or present — can now potentially appear in search results served to users inside the EEA, the bloc comprising the European Union member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Results shown to users elsewhere, including the United States and the United Kingdom, remain governed by the policy as before.

This creates a two-track reality for affected publishers:

• EEA users may see pages that remain suppressed elsewhere.
• Non-EEA users see results unchanged by this notification.
• Site owners need to evaluate visibility and traffic region by region rather than treating a manual action as a single global verdict.

For marketing teams, the split complicates reporting. A page's impressions and clicks in Google Search Console can now diverge sharply between EEA and non-EEA markets for the same URL, and recovery benchmarks set before August 30 may no longer hold for European traffic.

Confirmed versus speculated

Two things are confirmed: the emails themselves, posted publicly by Gabe, and the policy language they contain, which states plainly that prior manual actions "will no longer impact search results shown to users within the EEA." The August 30 effective date comes from the notification.

What remains unconfirmed is why Google drew the carve-out. The email points to a policy page and further documentation, but the company has not, in the material posted, explained its reasoning. Observers had anticipated a regional change of this kind — Gabe noted as much — yet the timing and mechanism arrived without advance announcement.

What to watch next

The immediate question is whether Google applies similar regional exceptions to other spam policies, and whether the EEA carve-out for site reputation abuse narrows or expands in the documented policy text. Site owners with any history of SRA manual actions should monitor their EEA search visibility in Search Console in the coming weeks, and watch for follow-up notifications.