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Experian Hitwise reports that downstream traffic to content farms has taken a big hit since Google's Panda initiative went into effect.

Panda is a change in Google's algorithm that punishes search rankings for websites that produce low-quality or unoriginal content. It had been rolled out on a small scale in late February with the full punch taking effect April 11. Hitwise reports that Demand Media, the largest of the content farms with sites like eHow.com, has taken a traffic hit of 40% in the two weeks that Panda has been in effect. Other sites in that space like entrepreneur Jason Calcanis' Mahalo (78%), Associated Content (61%) as well as Examiner.com (51%) have seen big dips in traffic coming from Google as well.

When Google announced a tweak to its search algorithm in February, the company presented the change as a move to help improve search results. The official announcement said it wanted to make sure search unearthed "high quality sites," and while it never specified what the "low quality sites" might be, many interpreted Google's move as an attack on content farms.

Considering that the company arguably most synonymous with content farms, Demand Media, had just filed an IPO the month prior, industry onlookers were eager to see the impact of the new algorithm.

The company issued a statement yesterday, downplaying the effect of the change on its pageviews and search ranking. But the stock market this morning seemed less than convinced as the company's shares took a hit.

Google made a change to its search algorithm last week that it said was designed to help users find more "high-quality sites." Although Google never described this move as one aimed at tackling the problem of content farms, many observers have viewed the algorithmic adjustments as Google's attempt to clean up its search results, following a number of complaints about the quality (or lack of quality) of the information in the sites that are retrieved and are highly ranked.

Google did say that the change would impact over 11% of sites, but would help surface those "with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."

So, is a search via Google better now? Is original content easier to find while content farms are buried on subsequent results pages?

Are you tired of eHow articles dominating your Google searches? Sick of that same site showing up every time you search for something? Had enough with Yahoo Answers and the inane, unending drivel it seems to drum up from the dregs of the Internet?

The Google Web search team has launched a Chrome browser extension today that will likely become your best friend then. The extension lets you block search results from showing up, meaning you never have to trudge through the murky depths of content farms again.

Large quantities of low quality content, of marginal relevance, intended to draw visitors through search, but drive them to click through ads to other sites - that's what's called a content farm. The voices of critics of Google are getting louder with allegations that the world's leading search engine has been thoroughly gamed and is now drowning in content farmed links. Content farm is a very subjective designation, though.

Search startup Blekko is betting that web users want to search without seeing results from companies that are pumping out low-quality content just for the ad revenue. But is one person's low quality content another person's more-accessible reading material? Today Blekko released a list of the top 20 domains that its users have clicked the "SPAM" button on in their search results. Content from those sites will never show up in a Blekko search again, the company says. What do you think of this list?

eHow, the Demand Media owned how-to site, quietly announced in an email to its users today that it would be making Facebook Login the exclusive way to log in to the site, a move the company alluded to in a FAQ entry earlier this month.

According to Inside Facebook, the site has given its users until the end of the month before it will delete all existing accounts and associated data and switching over entirely to Facebook. So far, the move has met with resistance and confusion among users, but could it work out for eHow in the end?.

We've written a lot about content farms and in particular the largest of them all, Demand Media. Shares of Demand Media rose 35% today on the back of its IPO. Demand Media's market valuation now matches the scale of its content business, which pumps out more than 7,000 new articles a day. At the current share price, Demand Media is valued at $1.5 Billion - more than the New York Times is worth.

Demand Media's IPO is the largest the tech market has seen since Google's in 2004. Which appears to have stirred the giant grizzly bear in Mountain View. In a recent blog post, Google assured the world that it is dealing with content farms - which it describes as "sites with shallow or low-quality content." I'm not sure that the market fully appreciates how risky a bet Demand Media is, if Google decides to crack down on content farms.

The Web has always rewarded quantity more than quality, but over 2010 this truism became even more pronounced with the growth of Content Farms. These are companies which create thousands of pieces of content per day. Much of it is in the form of how-to articles and is often referred to as "evergreen" informational content, because it's relevant for much longer than news.

By the end of last year, two of these content farms - Demand Media and Answers.com - were firmly established inside the top 20 Web properties in the U.S. as measured by comScore. This year, Demand Media filed for IPO and two big Internet portals - AOL and Yahoo! - joined the trend. Let's take a look back on the year of the Content Farm and their collective impact in the Web.

Content farms have been in the spotlight over the past year. They're companies that generate hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content on a daily basis. Much of their traffic comes from Google search, so the aim of content farms is to rake in the money with online advertising. Demand Media has been the most ambitious of these companies, but even the big portals are doing it nowadays. Yahoo! recently acquired Associated Content and AOL launched an initiative earlier this year disingeniously called Seed.

In our content farms coverage so far, we've focused mostly on textual content farms. But video may well be the next frontier. A startup called Howcast specializes in mass production of video content.

Two months ago, Yahoo! acquired Associated Content for an estimated $90-100M. Over the past few years, Associated Content has become one of the most prolific content farms (companies that churn out hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content every day). It produces 10,000 new pieces of content per week, which averages out to about 1,500 per day. This isn't as big an output as Demand Media, which at last estimate is doing 7,000 pieces of content per day. But it's three times as large as Suite101, which we profiled yesterday.

The acquisition increased the number of pages Yahoo! has on the Web by over 10% and brought Yahoo! back into the original content game, albeit in a largely unbranded way at this point. Let's look at how Yahoo! has been using its new farm...