Alphabet’s Google on Friday said it had changed its spam policy in Europe to address EU concerns that could have resulted in an antitrust fine.

The U.S. tech giant found itself in EU regulators’ crosshairs after publishers complained ⁠about ​its site reputation abuse policy.

It targets the practice of publishing third-party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search ​rankings ​by taking advantage of the ⁠host site’s ranking signals, commonly referred to as parasite SEO.

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The EU ‌said that its monitoring showed that Google’s spam policy demoted news media and other publishers’ websites and content in Google search results, when those websites include content from commercial partners.

Google said ⁠that from ⁠August 30 any manual actions taken to demote sites would not ⁠apply ‌to users in the 27 ​EU nations, Iceland, Norway and ‌Liechtenstein (the European Economic Area).

The policy would not change outside the European ‌Economic Area, it ​added.

Concerns ​about the ​policy had prompted the European Commission, which acts as the ​EU competition enforcer, to open an ⁠investigation under the Digital Markets Act, which aims to rein in the power ‌of Big ⁠Tech.

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DMA breaches can cost companies fines of up to ​10% of their global annual turnover.