When Google rolled out their Panda update last year, many of the larger content sites were affected. Low-quality content was the target last year and after nearly a dozen known updates, search results have been better as a result. What wasn’t addressed was the plague of “blackhat SEO” that utilizes different tactics to help websites rank better for keywords that can send massive traffic to their clients.

An unofficial announcement at SXSW by Matt Cutts, Google search spam czar, points to changes that Google has planned that addresses the blackhat issue.

“We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks,” Cutts said. “We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site.”

The changes appear to be rolling out already as there have been reports of large SEO networks being de-indexed and forced to shut down as a result. Is beginning of a true crackdown on search spam?

“We should see this expand tremendously over the next few months,” said Rocco Penn, an automotive SEO. “Google and Bing both want real content that people want to read, not automated spam crap that has worked so well in the past. If they can make this work, I’m pumped.”

Finding blackhat SEO networks is relatively easy for a team the size of Google’s Web Spam Division. They have been aware of many of the networks that influence search rankings by creating thousands of pages with a paragraph or two of content that includes anchor text to specific search targets. The challenge has been in how to address them.