More parasite opportunities for the EU?

We've all seen popular parasite domains being hit during Google updates (it's 'Site Reputation Abuse' spam actions), wiping out millions of positions. But thanks to the good old EU enforcers, Google is no longer allowed to arbitrarily hit domains with the ban hammer for such actions, and Google have updated their policies to reflect this: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/08/update-site-reputation-policy?hl=en

These are the 2 main points:

For users outside the EEA, a manual action regarding our site reputation policy will directly affect search results for the portion of the site affected. As before, the rest of the site won't be affected.
For users inside the EEA, the impact of the manual action won't apply. The affected section of the site may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site.

Click to expand...

This isn't live for a few days yet, but it will be interesting to see if we have a load of old domains bounce back in EU geos, and if they do it might start yet another parasite gold rush for niches targeting European countries.

I see this a little differently.

Just because Google is removing the manual action impact in the EEA does not mean parasite seo is automatically getting a free pass or that old pages will come back.

Google says these sections may be separated from the main site and ranked independently. So the real question is whether they will still keep enough of the main domains authority to rank well.

If they do, then yes, there could be a good opportunity. But I think we need to see what actually happens in the search results first.

The change is interesting, but I would not assume it means a new parasite seo gold rush yet.