Google has started emailing site owners through Search Console to say that earlier site reputation manual actions no longer affect search results shown to users in the European Economic Area (EEA). Search Engine Roundtable reported on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, that the change took effect on August 30, 2026, so the notices arrive roughly two months after the policy shift itself.
This is an update to our earlier coverage, “Google Drops EEA Manual Actions for Parasite SEO,” published in late August. That story described the policy change. The emails show Google communicating it directly to site owners.
The email is titled “New Site Reputation Policy Change.” Glenn Gabe posted it on X, and Search Engine Roundtable reproduced the text. It reads: “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.”
Gabe described who received it. In his words, the emails “went out just now to sites that have been impacted by SRA manual actions in the past.” He added a caveat: “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).” So the notice appears to reach sites with a historical action, not only those with one active today.
Search Engine Roundtable also reports a matching message in the manual actions viewer in Search Console, under “View related messages.” Site owners who want to confirm their own status can look there rather than rely on the email alone.
The wording is narrow. The email speaks of the “previous manual action” and of “search results shown to users within the EEA.” Nothing in the source says the actions were lifted outside the EEA, and nothing says the policy itself was withdrawn globally. The source also gives no reason for the change and no count of affected sites, and this report does not supply either.
Some background helps with scale. Google introduced the site reputation abuse policy with the March 2024 core update, aimed at what Search Engine Roundtable has called parasite SEO. Google began enforcing the policy in Europe in January 2025. The policy has therefore applied in the EEA for a little under two years before this carve-out for previously actioned pages.
Analysis: the practical question for a search team is which of its pages carried a past site reputation action, and where its audience sits. A site with a historical action and a large EEA audience may now see different treatment there than in other markets. Google has not published, in this source, any measurement of how rankings changed, so any recovery claim would need your own data.
Teams that inherited a site with a site reputation history should check the manual actions viewer, record which pages were affected, and compare EEA and non-EEA performance in Search Console over the coming weeks before drawing conclusions about recovery.
Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz, November 4, 2026.
