You may have heard that Matt Cutts recently announced Google is planning to start penalizing overly optimized websites. Google says their goal is to “level the playing field” and offer websites that offer truly great content a chance to rank up there with sites that don’t offer good content but have overdone their SEO. This can sound really scary for websites that are following SEO best practices.
Anvil’s take on this is that Google is doing what they have all along and just looking for a differentiator to speak about as to why their search engine is better. Google has always rewarded good user experience and shunned sketchy link building tactics and over using keywords. Perhaps as the general public is getting more savvy as to how search engines work, Google is using this as an opportunity to start educating the public on what they are doing (or have been doing) to ensure a more relevant search.
Time to panic? No. Time to continue using white hat seo tactics? Always.