Google’s Farmer Update (officially called: Panda Update) at the end of February forced a lot of content producing Web properties to take a closer look at their model and how it fit into Google’s new algorithm — aimed at improving quality. Content farms such as howtodothings.com and mahalo.com, both known for churning out poorly written content, loaded with keywords, that secured top listings in Google were penalized severely. In fact, Mahalo was hit so hard that it had to eliminate 10% of its workforce shortly after the change.
The takeaway here is for anyone looking to rank remotely high in search results is to avoid shallow, unoriginal, poorly written or useless content. Sites who do this — the same sites that were part of the small fraction of sites effected by this change — are just a couple of steps away from being a spammer.