Probably for a lot of people here, this is old news but a few weeks ago, Google announced their plan to update their ranking algorithm to penalize so called content farms. For anyone not in the know, a content farm is a low-quality informational site, the offers little value to the searcher or is entirely made up of scraped and republished content.

Well the update goes into effect today. You can read more here: Official Google Blog: Finding more high-quality sites in search

Chris