By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Alphabet’s Google was hit with an EU antitrust investigation into its spam policy on Thursday following complaints from publishers who say it has hurt their revenues, putting the U.S. tech giant at risk of yet another hefty fine.

Google began cracking down against companies gaming its search algorithm to push up rankings for other sites in March last year.

Its site reputation abuse policy 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.

The European Commission said its monitoring indicated that Google is demoting news media and other publishers’ websites and content in Google search results when those webs

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