Search giant Google is planning on penalising the search ranking of web sites deemed to be ‘over optimised’ according to comments made by Google’s head of web spam.

Google’s Matt Cutts said that the company would move to “level the playing field” between sites that alter their site extensively to gain better search results over those that were simply “making great content.”

Cutts made the comments at a SXSW panel titled “Dear Google & Bing: Help Me Rank Better” and added that the changes to Google’s search algorithm would take place over the next few weeks.

“We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect,” Cutts said according to a transcript on Search Engine Land.

Each time Google changes the algorithms used to rank web pages in so-called organic search results, there are winners and losers which can significantly alter the traffic and therefore ad revenue to commercial web sites.