Google has changed its algorithm in response to the growth in the number of content farms and the volume of content they’re producing. Content farms churn out pages designed to grab good rankings for search terms in Google and other engines. The pages are almost always of questionable value but they hit the right keywords and because of that they get the search rankings and they get the eyeballs. Google knows these pages aren’t particularly useful so they’ve changed the algorithm that builds their search results to weed out these sites.
The new Google search algorithm is already working well. A number of low quality sites that churn out content for the sole purpose of getting hits have lost significant visibility. They were trying to game the system and Google has nixed that. The interesting thing is that a lot of these sites spent lots of money getting started and on people to produce that content. Several big content farms have already seen a significant drop in traffic and some have even laid off workers. That’s what happens when you don’t do quality work though. It comes back to bite you in the butt.