During the next few days we are going to see some major changing in the never ending search engine optimization game played between Google and webmasters.

The upcoming change which will probably be called Panda (again) Google is going to "punish" websites for over optimizing their websites. This basically means giving less emphasize on the true value for the visitor and more emphasize on the required steps to rank high in search engines which includes: excessive use of keywords on the website, excessive use of backlinks that are no natural of course (link buying) and higher weight to the visitor's activity on the website.

This means that even if your website is not as popular (backlink wise) as a large budget media website but the content and value you provide for the visitor is better, you can outrank your competitor.

The true value the visitor gets will probably be measured by factors such as bounce rate (the lower the better) , page views (the more the merrier) and time and site (the longer the better).

These news which were announced by Google's Matt Cutts will be a game changer for sure as now webmasters will focus on how to please visitors instead of pleasing the Google bots crawling their websites.

The bottom line is that you have nothing to worry about if you provide a real value to your visitors and you have all the reasons to worry about if your website is nothing but an SEO oriented website intended to generate as much organic traffic as possible but provide that traffic with nothing but nothing.

How to avoid a penalty?

The answer is simple - have a look at your website and imagine you were a visitor to your website, are you enjoying your visit? Did you find what you were looking for? Does anyone else provide a better solution than you? If so, how can you provide a better solution?

If you answered these questions and made the improvements to your websites you are less likely to take a hit.