The Google 'Farmer' update (internally referred to as the Google Panda update) is the latest big change in the Google search engine algorithm. As website designers get more cunning, Google needed to change the way it treated the spammiest pages in its results so that it continues to deliver the best quality search results available.
It reflects badly on any search engine if - when you click on one of the results - your first instinct is to hit the back button on your browser.
You know the type of site like the back of your hand: banks of text adverts, flashing banners and no real content.
Or, even worse, a site that displays different results to the search engines than to real humans.
The Google 'Farmer' update was designed to get rid of the worst offenders. As with everything else search engine related, this was done by tweaking the computer program (algorithm) to drastically reduce the lower quality results.
So, how can you survive the Google 'Farmer' update?
You may not like to hear this but you'll need to increase the emphasis on quality content for your site visitors. And also for any pages and articles that point to your website.
Your site is - or should be - good quality already. The days are gone when you could simply scrape other people's content or "spin" articles so that they appeared unique to search engines but were almost written in another language as far as real humans are concerned.
Of course, if this article reads like it was written by a Martian, there's a good chance it's not on the original site but has been thrown through an auto-translator a few times. Either that or I'm making less sense than usual.
A lot of sites that took a hit in the search engine rankings with the Google 'Farmer' update were what are loosely termed feeder sites - not your own site but an article or other content site that seemingly grows low-ish quality articles with the occasional gem. A bit like a lot of modern food is grown in factory-like conditions. Hence the term farmer as these feeder sites could easily be termed article farms.
What this means is that you need to improve the quality of any articles pointing to your website. Maybe not to the high quality you'd use on your own site but certainly pretty close.
That way the pages linking to your own website will be of decent quality in the eyes of the search engines and site visitors. That way you'll stand a much higher chance of surviving the Google 'Farmer' update.