We all saw it coming, but maybe not so soon. Google have announced publicly that they are gearing up to penalise websites that over-optimise their pages to gain higher search rankings.

Google state that while they are trying to improve the quality of their service by returning more relevant results than their competitors, they are targeting the abusers of the system. Websites that over-optimise keywords and their pages in an attempt to boost themselves to the top spot.

This update to the Google rankings will be rolled out in the next few weeks and is currently being worked on by the engineers at Google Headquarters.

While cleaning up their index can only be a good thing, we can only foresee innocent sites getting caught in the crossfire and suffering some of the consequences intended for others.

On one hand, this will encourage an entirely new way of optimising pages and inspires creative thinking and best practise, but on the other hand, is this really what the search industry needs right now?