It looks like google has overlooked the way their index has been for the past few years and decided to review article websites that were previously used to get a lot of links. The problem was not with the actual websites, but with the overall concept of sharing the content publicly. This concept creates a problem of duplicate content which does not give newly established websites any credibility and the links from those websites do not give much PR juice to websites they point to any more.

As for everything else, Google rankings is still a game of mainly backlinks and some onsite optimization. So make sure to get good quality links.

Here is a video from Wall Street Journal about Content Farms: