Few days ago I reported that Google is about to launch within weeks a new algorithm to target sites doing overly search engine optimization (SEO) as it has been revealed in a search engines panel at SXSW by Matt Cutts (Google’s “spam cop”).

It is pretty obvious that the general idea behind this algorithm is to offer high quality content sites, however that lacks in SEO, more exposure on the expense of sites with less quality content but with (excessive) high levels of SEO.

At first I thought that Cutts spit it out by mistake, even he said that they don’t normally announced on algorithm before rolling them out. But when I listened to the audio again, it sounded very intentional- “That’s a fantastic question and I’m really glad you asked it…”

Why then does Matt Cutts is announcing deliberately on search algorithmic updates before their official launch?

Maybe it is part of the company’s transparent efforts (such as the monthly search updates post series) or maybe it was intended to offer site owners the opportunity to get ready (or maybe both). In any case, it looks like something big is about to arrive and webmasters should self-examine their websites.

It is also important to remember that Google only announcing on specific algorithms when they carry potentially a big impact on the search results and can affect many websites. That can be another clue that this is a serious algorithmic update.

But how much optimization is too much optimization? At this point it’s still unclear even though Matt Cutts points out on keywords stuffing and “too many” link exchange, where Google already dealing with these kind of methods at least in some extent.

Sites being caught in link exchange schemes for instance, are already being penalized (this story is a good example for it). So presumably, this algorithm could be much more sophisticated than what we have witnessed so far, something like the next generation of the “old” Panda algorithm.

Of course, it can also turn out to be less dramatic… Even so, Google’s message is clear and at least in my thoughts it goes something like this: “The Googlebot is getting smarter and all those SEO rankings manipulation ways that worked before are living on borrowed time. We’ll get you sooner or later…”

I remember that just a few years ago, a lot of spam sites ruled the search results, solely due to SEO manipulations. Through time, their number has been constantly reduced although we can still find many of them on the search results today.

Well, it looks like another round of dilution is coming…