I’ve long been a major complainer when it comes to low-quality content sites gaming SEO with big bucks and dedicate resources all with the goal of being in the first few organic SERPs (so they can steal traffic from higher quality sites).
The bottom line is that people like myself (and great sites like SEOmoz) are busy producing good content – which is where they should be spending their time; not gaming results to get high rankings like eHow and About.com. If you have ever come across a useful, meaningful article from one of those sites, please let me know.
However, those sites bring Google billions of dollars because of ad sharing programs such as AdWords.
But, Google has finally realized that if users find valuable content, that quality user experience will pay better dividends in the long run versus spammy sites or low value sites.
So, Google has been rolling out a number of new programs that place emphasis on social signals, authority and semantics and a little bit less on “all that other stuff” that big companies have mastered gaming over the past 5-10 years.