Head of Google’s Web Spam Team, Matt Cutts, has set SEO tongues wagging this month with comments he made at a SXSW Conference session. In the panel session called Dear Google & Bing, Help Me Rank Better!, Matt inferred that Google is working on a new algorithm filter that penalizes sites that appear to be over-optimized. According to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land, here’s exactly what Matt said: ———————————————————————————————————————— “Now, what’s interesting about your question is you went a little bit deeper and you said, “Well, what about all the people who are sort of optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO?” And, uh, normally we don’t sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something that we’ve been working on in the last few months. And hopefully, in the next couple months or so, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it. And the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit.