In response to Alphabet subsidiary Google's crackdown on businesses that manipulate its search algorithm to boost ranks for other websites, a German media company has filed a complaint with EU antitrust authorities.

Hamburg-based Meraki Group GmbH complained to the European Commission that the policy penalizes websites and called for swift action against it.

"Google continues to unilaterally set the rules of doing business online in its own favor, preferencing its own commercial offerings and depriving competing service providers of any visibility. It is time to put an effective end to this," Meraki's lawyer Thomas Hoppner said.

The practice of publishing third-party pages on a website in an effort to manipulate search rankings by exploiting the host site's ranking signals—also known as parasite SEO—is the focus of Google's site reputation abuse policy, which was introduced in March of last year.

The European Publishers Council, European Newspaper Publishers Association, and European Magazine Media Association jointly filed a letter on Tuesday urging regulatory action, which was echoed by Meraki's complaint.

Google claimed to have changed its spam policy in response to user input.

Several emailed requests for comment from the Commission, the EU's 27-member competition watchdog, were not answered.

The publishers claimed that their traffic and earnings had been negatively impacted by Google's purportedly opaque manual penalty adjustments and uneven policy enforcement against websites that collaborated with third-party content providers.

Also Read: India to Diversify the Semiconductor Supply Chain through Semicon 2.0

They said that since Google implemented its strategy in January, media outlets in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and other European nations have documented significant declines in search engine ranks.