In February/March of this year, many of you may have noticed that your pages/sites in the search engine page results either suffered a hit or that the amount of traffic you receive seemed to jump overnight.  That’s because Google has yet again updated it’s ranking algorithm–in a MAJOR way.  Why, you might ask.  Basically,  it was to reduce the amount of duplicate content and content that was created to perhaps  satisfy the search engines without providing any real value to the user.

As the world’s largest search engine, Google is going to do what is necessary to protect it’s brand.  One example of this that you might have seen in the news is how Google  went after something known as Content Farms.  Content Farms are basically companies that hire people a bunch of people to generate content for the search engines so they can then use that content to make money from adsense programs and such.

The problem with this is that the people who are usually hired to generate content farms are paid based on how much content they create.  So, as you might suspect, these people are all about making money than they are into writing quality content.  The latest Google update goes beyond the scope of content farms, however.  A number of popular article sites were also hit, due to the fact that they publish re-hashed content in the same way a Content Farm does.

As a result, article sites like Squidoo, Ezine Articles, and others have become more strict in the content they allow on their sites.  To avoid falling prey to the latest Google update, it’s important that you keep Google’s primary objective in mind when writing content–to provide up-to-date, quality content with a unique perspective that the end user can put to use.