Google's Farmer Update at the end of February forced many Web businesses to take a closer look at their content and how it would rank under a new algorithm aimed at improving quality. So-called content farms such as Demand Media and Associated Content, both routinely vilified for churning out shabbily produced, keyword-loaded content that often secured top listings at Google, were penalized severely. Mahalo, another member of the content-farming community, was hit so hard that it had to eliminate 10-percent of its workforce shortly after the change. The final takeaway for anyone looking to rank remotely high in search results is to avoid shallow, unoriginal, poorly written or virtually useless content whenever possible (see https://wsm.co/eMHi06 for suggestions).
