Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced as a side note during his panel at SXSW that Google is releasing an algorithm update specifically to target sites over doing their SEO.
Matt Cutts said this is Google’s attempt to "level the playing field" between webmasters that build quality content versus webmasters who are just really aggressive SEOs.
Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-over-seo-update-14887.html
Discussion on Google+ https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/K5NQrTLJfjj
There’s some good comments on this WSJ article which focuses more on the semantic search side of the announcment:<o:p></o:p>· Casper Deseyne Wrote:<o:p></o:p>“If google is going to crawl websites for semantic information and display this information directly to the user, then why would website owners bother creating content if google is going to give all the answers without the user having to visit a site, generating a page view for the website owner (thus generating income for the owner). What they would be doing is using others people efforts, crawl (steal) the content and display this content directly (semanticly) with there own ads (adwords). They are getting greedy and it will eventually backfire at them, unless they start giving back to the publishers they crawl from. Let’s say that AI is going to hit singularity and google will be able to give all the answers, what then? No one will bother creating content.”<o:p></o:p>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304459804577281842851136290.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs%3Darticle<o:p></o:p>From: Deepend [mailto:post@deepend.posterous.com] Sent: Monday, 19 March 2012 5:13 PMTo: Pip JonesSubject: [deepend] Google to penalize over optimised websites<o:p></o:p><o:p></o:p>This is a private email. Please do not forward.<o:p></o:p><tr><td></td></tr><tr><td width=”20″></td><td><tr><td width=”610″><o:p></o:p></td></tr><tr><td><tr><td></td><td width=”594″> </td></tr><tr><td width=”16″></td><td width=”578″><tr><td></td></tr></td></tr></td></tr></td></tr>