Calacanis spoke about Panda again today at a ReadWriteWeb event, saying, “Yeah, Panda has cut our traffic in half. Yet, it didn’t affect our YouTube traffic at all.”

It is quite interesting to note how Google attitude towards quality content seems to be quite a bit different when it comes to YouTube. This is something HubPages CEO Paul Edmondson has brought up several times, particularly in relation to how Google has treated YouTube content in its search results. YouTube was actually helped by the Panda update.

Also worth noting, is that Demand Media is the biggest supplier of video to YouTube. As you may know, some of Demand’s properties got hit hard by the update as well. The company recently announced it was getting rid of some of its lower quality eHow content, but implied that we shouldn’t expect much of the company’s video content to be coming down.

ReadWriteWeb’s Dan Rowinski covered Calcanis’s session, reporting:

Essentially, Calacanis sees the future of the Web through the lenses of experts who produce video. He does not hold out hope that he can approach Google to tweak Panda so that Mahalo does not suffer along with the rest of the so-called content farms.

Calacanis is also betting on the resurrection of the email newsletter, this time as an interactive discussion engine of experts. His newest venture is called Launch and is centered around tech news. And as he is known to do, Calacanis is predicting big things for Launch.

We’re not entirely sure what he means by the resurrection of the email newsletter, as this medium has been thriving for quite some time. Calacanis also said blogging is dead.

He adds, however, "We’ve had quite a few niche categories go up in traffic but the overall is still lower than before last Thursday. I’ve heard today (Wired.com) that Google is working on getting it more ‘right’ so that great content doesn’t get caught in this filter and I’m hopeful that we’ll see better rankings for most of our members who deserve it."

You can read more about changes the company was looking at here. Since he mentioned Twitter, here’s some recent messages they’ve put out:

On Facebook, Knight added:

Christopher KnightJust announced via Twitter that we won’t be laying off any of our 75 behind-the-scenes team members due to last Thursday’s Google algo update. High quality exception articles will always rise to the top; so shall EzineArticles.com again in the near future. 22 hours ago via Facebook · 16 likes · 9 comments

He added in the comments of that post, "I’m trying to stay focused on what I’m grateful for. We still served over a million people yesterday. How awesome is that!? Yet, I’m still on high-alert to ensure we do everything we can to draw a very sharp line as to what denotes quality content vs. what should never be published. The bar has been raised, but that’s nothing new."

The talk about not laying people off is presumably in reference to the Mahalo situation we covered here. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis told us "All we can do is put our heads down and continue to make better and better content. If we do our job I’m certain the algorithm will treat us fairly in the long-term." 

"The 90+ members of our team are rallying around this challenge, and you will continue to see amazing content from experts with real credentials at Mahalo.com," he added. 

Clearly, despite some of the questionable casualties of Google’s update it seems the message was sent loud and clear. You better be putting out quality content if you’re expecting to get traffic from Google. 

The eHow debate will surely continue to rage on, as that site still gets plenty of Google love, but Demand Media does nothing but stress the importance it is putting on quality as well. 

In time, we’ll see how Google’s search quality holds up, and how the traffic levels of some of these sites do – and how dependent on Google they remain. 

In a recent Google Blog post, Matt Cutts wrote: 

One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. To be crystal clear:

- Buying Google ads does not increase a site’s rankings in Google’s search results.

That’s Google’s "crystal clear" position on the matter. Whether you want to believe it or not is up to you. This will likely be questioned for years to come – never proven or disproved. With eHow still ranking so well in Google, the disbelief of some will no doubt continue. 

Jason Calacanis, who has been in the headlines today due to layoffs at Mahalo, shared some thoughts on Quora about Google search quality and its relationship to AdSense. On whether or not ad spend with Google influences natural search position, Calacanis,  whose site Mahalo was hit hard by the Google algorithm update (hence those layoffs), says, "No way."

He wrote:  "These two sides of the business have a 100 foot chinese wall between them. I know, because over three companies and tens of millions of dollars in google adsense revenue I can tell you that when we had an issue with Google search even *ASKING* the revenue side resulted in a response like ‘you don’t want us to ask Google search quality for help because they will not listen to us or even let us in the building. Church and state in my experience."

"Now, I do think that Google *might* be alerted to the existence of a site via things like google chrome, google analytics and google adsense," he added. "This means that the google spider might crawl your site quicker because of these services, but it doesn’t impact your rank in any way."

He goes on to say that he thinks people get "conspiracy theorist" about it. Like many conspiracy theories, it may not ever go away. 

Google did devalue a lot of sites that use AdSense. 

Another Goolger (in the same Quora thread) poitned to this page as the most basic explanation of what affects a site’s ranking.

He told us, "All we can do is put our heads down and continue to make better and better content. If we do our job I’m certain the algorithm will treat us fairly in the long-term."

"The 90+ members of our team are rallying around this challenge, and you will continue to see amazing content from experts with real credentials at Mahalo.com," he added.

Mahalo is re-evaluating its freelance content production strategy, and is even pausing it for the time being. The company’s video unit is still going strong, however, which Mahalo says is encouraging it to ramp up video production. 

Google has been talking about refining the update, to let some of the higher quality content that got hit work its way back up in the rankings. We’ll see if Mahalo recovers. 

Some are less than thrilled with the new feature, however.The feature was announced during an event based around the concept of giving users more control, but it appears that more control doesn’t necessarily mean complete control. Jason Calacanis, for example, found out the hard way that anyone can be added to a group, regardless of whether or not they actually opted in (hat tip to Matthew Ingram). The group creator has the ability to make the group open, closed, or secret.

Calacanis found out he was added to a Facebook group for NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association), along with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. At Calacanis.com, Jason posted an email he sent to Facebook informing them of what happened. He closed with, "If you guys want to run these new features by me before you launch them, I can probably save you from a couple of privacy law suits each year."

This is really the kind of thing you would think Facebook would want to avoid after all of the privacy brouhaha earlier this year. Of course not everyone is going to have people adding them to questionable groups, but if it can be done, some people just aren’t going to be comfortable with it. 

It’s not much different from tagging in Facebook Photos, a feature that I’ve frankly had issues with myself. It’s nice that anyone can tag you in a photo and have that show up first thing in the photos on your profile isn’t it? Groups adds that extra layer of association though, which some my find even more objectionable, as with Calacanis’ case. With this kind of functionality, people could be made to look like they’re Nazis, KKK members, pedophiles, Justin Bieber fans, or anything else.  Granted, users can report groups to Facebok:

I can definitely see the feature being abused for politics. It’s probably already happening. 

The feature does appear to only let you add people who you are friends with to Groups, so you may want to choose your friends carefully. It may not be a good idea to be friends with just anybody, and if you are, at least keep up with your notifications. You will be notified when you’ve been added to a group. 

The email feature has received some criticism as well. If you are added to a group and you don’t keep up with your notifications, you may find your inbox getting filled up by people in that group posting things. You can put an end to this by opting out, but some feel you should have to opt in to this feature to begin with. 

What do you think of the new Facebook Groups? Let us know. 

Danny Sullivan

Earlier this week, big media (New York Times, Disney, BusinessWeek, Hearst) lodged a bit of a tantrum because they felt Google wasn’t treating them special enough and was giving too much credit to scrapers and aggregators. Sullivan strides to the other, more populist side, saying Google seems to dote on Web-celebs like Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, and Jason Calacanis.

Sullivan’s main target was Kawasaki’s new Alltop venture, which is essentially a categorized news aggregator. (Kawasaki calls it an “online magazine rack.”) Users can select categories of interest that lead to lists of subdomains where articles on those topics are brought together. It’s not exactly a new idea, but it does have Kawasaki’s former Apple evangelist weight behind it.

We were unable to duplicate what Sullivan was seeing in his Google search results for keywords like “economic news,” “food news,” etc., but Sullivan’s good reputation precedes him, and we have no reason to doubt what he saw. Google may have corrected, or it could be a regional result variance—from here, older Topix.com, with subfolders instead of subdomains, appears high up the list. (Subfolders, unless I’m mistaken, have been traditionally more SEO friendly.)

We know that in its effort to produce fresher results, a slight tweak to the algorithm was allowing cybercrooks to follow Google Trends, parasite host on trusted sites, and gain high rankings redirecting to scareware (bogus alerts warning a user’s computer is infected to scare them into buying fake anti-virus phishing programs). That glitch appears to have been addressed, and it may have affected Alltop. 

But it still leaves the question about whether in Google’s pursuit of fast, relevant, recent, and trustworthy search results they company has unduly weighted new ventures of star players. Sullivan presents the classic class struggle flipside:

“If Joe Schmoe SEO dude came along and rolled out hundreds of domains like this, worked it on Twitter, who wants to say Google wouldn’t be down on them like a ton of bricks?”

Chris Pirillo

He then brings up Chris Pirillo’s ill-fated Gada.be, whose subdomains got the site banned in Google. The site was eventually unbanned. Meanwhile, Sullivan suggests Godin’s Squidoo received a spam-pass from Google until Calacanis torpedoed it. To top it off, Calacanis’ Mahalo, despite Google’s decree it would drop search engine results from other search engines in its index, still gets quite a bit of Google love.

“You kind of feel sorry for Joe Schmoe,” writes Sullivan. “Build a name by once having worked for Apple or by having written a few marketing books, and you seem to get much better treatment than Joe would get if he pulled the same SEO play stunts.

”Alltop, Mahalo, Squidoo — none of them dominate Google. But seriously, Squidoo has a PR8 home page? Alltop has a PR7? Search Engine Land, which actually produces original content, sits with a PR6 — but these guys that simply compile content from others get a big fat PR kiss on the lips?”

It seems likely those who’ve been used as examples already know the online marketing game very well and also carry with them loyal armies willing to link to any new venture they launch, which gives them an automatic advantage over Joe Schmoe. But it could also be that Google’s constant struggle to balance trust and relevance could also be a player.