Early this month we have heard of two very important announcements from Google at the SXSW conference. These announcements are expected to deepen the woes of online marketers and businesses all over the world. The head of search spam at Google revealed that his organization will be rolling out a new program that will be targeting bad merchants. It is called the Google Merchant Quality Algorithm.

The SXSW conference conducted a session called the “How to Rank Better In Google and Bing” moderated by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. During the session, one merchant came with the question that suggested that bad merchants were ranking better in Google Search than his business. That got an immediate response from Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts revealed that the algorithm will be rolling later in the year or sooner and lower quality merchants will be facing the full rigor of the algorithm. He expressed his unhappiness at the fact that many of these merchants are ranking in search results.

Another announcement that took place at the conference was updates in Penguin, Panda and New Link Network Targets. According to Cutts, the new update to Penguin is going to be “significant” and is going a much discussed topic in the SEO industry. The last update to Penguin was in October last year. It is expected that Panda update will happen on 16th or 18th of this month, Cutts announced these updates at the SMX West 2013 conference.

Cutts also announced new updates to the Link Network Targets. According to him, the updates are likely to happen in the next two weeks.

Google has been taken measures to rid the web of poor quality content and punish marketers who indulge in dubious tactics in order to influence their rankings in search results. In the last two years, many search marketers have seen their rankings go down the drain, when Google introduced the Panda and Penguin Updates.

With these new updates, the search engine optimization industry is expected to see more roads ahead. If you are not doing what is right then you rest assured. But if you are engaged practices that do not to the standards of Google, then you have a lot to worry about.

There was a lot discussed at the conference. Some of the key topics that were focused on include keyword research and copyrighting for search success, performance metrics in the SEO, PPC best practices, mobile search, among various other topics.