Google’s Farmer Update
Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm to ensure that they give their users the best results possible, but early on February 24th they made a pretty big change. According to their blog post this "improvement" is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites.
What's defined as low-quality? Sites that copy a significant amount of their content from others or that don't add a lot of value for their users.
The goal here is to help promote high-quality content and the sites that produce it. If you want your site to rank then you have to produce original content that is throughly researched, providing an in-depth answers to what searchers are looking for.
There has been a lot of talk about "content farms" recently, so this update has been named the "Farmer Update" by several webmasters. It seems the intent was to de-value sites that mass-produce content like Demand Media, AOL, and Maholo.
This change has caused a lot of backlash from webmasters who felt like they were producing quality content before, only to see their rankings suffer a serious drop. Nobody is entirely certain what made their site become less-valueable in the eyes of Google, but I have a theory.
Sites that mass produce content do not get a lot of links. Some sites produce thousands of new articles each and every day, but they are not getting that same number of links. I think the key to ranking high with the new Google will be to build less news style content and more quality, evergreen content that will have a better chance of getting linked to. You might have to work a little harder at getting links to all of your pages, and not just focusing on the landing pages you most want your users to get to.
I don't think any site got a direct penalty. I think what happens is that normally each page that you have produces pagerank that you can use to drive anchor text towards your landing pages. Under this rule large sites win out in the long run because they can drive more pagerank to the pages they want to rank. With this update, pages that are worthless (in Google's eyes) aren't helping the sites push pagerank to their landing pages. Thus, the sites that went down in the rankings are just suffering a drop due to their internal links being discounted.
Now that's just my theory, but I think it matches up with Google's intent. Produce high-quality stuff, update it when need be, and it should draw links from other sites. If you are doing this I doubt your site will ever go unappreciated in Google's eyes.
Update: I checked WebmasterWorld and found an interesting post from user "DanAbbamont." His data showed the hit article directories have taken:
Article Directories Have Been Devalued Significantly
- ezinearticles.com lost an average of 34 positions
- hubpages.com lost an average of 31 positions
- squidoo.com lost an average of 15 positions
- articlesbase.com lost an average of 29 positions
- buzzle.com lost an average of 30 positions
- associatedcontent.com lost an average of 22 positions
- suite101.com lost an average of 33 positions
Update: Sistrix has a nice list of sites that have been hit hard by the newest update. The top six are WiseGeek, EzineArticles, Suite101, Hubpages, Buzzle, and AssociatedContent.