One of the more publicized stories about this was that of Mahalo, which laid off 10% of its staff after being hit by the Panda update. At the time, Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis told WebProNews, “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.

At the time, Mahalo was reevaluating its freelance content production strategy, and talked about ramping up its video production efforts, as the company’s video unit was still going strong.

In fact all signs have pointed to video content performing quite well throughout all the iterations of the Panda update that have rolled out over the course of the year. Video sites were often among the top winners on various lists that came out (including Google’s own YouTube of course).

Demand Media launched its big eHow clean-up effort, but pretty much left its video content alone.

But it’s harder to monetize YouTube videos than it was mass content.

Liz Gannes at All Things D reports that Mahalo has laid off another 25% of its staff as it re-adjusts its strategy again, turning away from video in favor of iPad apps. Gannes writes:

Rapp [Mahalo President Jason Rapp] noted that while Mahalo’s videos get 30 million views per month, they are not necessarily profitable based on YouTube ads. Educational iPad apps, by contrast, seem to be instant money makers, because users will pay for them. Mahalo plans to gear up to release one app per week, though it only has four out so far. It will also continue to make educational videos.

It will be interesting to see how the quality of apps is maintained as this strategy progresses, and if the strategy turns into the money-maker that Mahalo hopes it will.

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.

Demand Media recently revealed that its search referrals had dropped by 20% folloiwng the Panda update, but it has still been ranking in numerous areas. I have no idea if eHow was ranking for this particular query pre-Panda, but it’s hard for me to imagine that even if it wasn’t the top Google result it wasn’t somewhere on the first page. Just a hunch.

Even knowing about eHow’s Panda hit, I was surprised to find when visiting the SERP for the query that eHow was nowhere to be found on the first page. What I found was actually how-to-write-a-resume.org ranking at the top. I let some time pass (a couple hours or so) to tend to some other content before writing this, and page one has already changed, and now has a Mahalo article at the top. This is interesting in itself for a couple reasons. For one, I have to wonder why Mahalo suddenly jumped up there, while when I looked at the query before, it was ranking on page two or three. Secondly, Mahalo was another one of the big Panda victims.

At the time of this writing, I’m not seeing an eHow result until lower page 5, and it even has the exac title, “How to Write a Resume”.

If you search that on eHow’s site, you’ll find that they have numerous articles on the topic. I will say that Mahalo’s content in this particular case does seem to be somewhat “deeper”. Is it the best result for the query? Hard to say.

Just a post-Panda observation.

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. 

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. 

News from the publisher, however, indicates that there is hope for some of those wronged by the update. As we reported before, Kahney was talking to Google’s Matt Cutts on Twitter about the issue:

Later, Kahney tweeted the following:

Kahney also told Wired, who picked up the story, "The site is miraculously back. Everything looks great. I’m wondering if it was you talking to them, but it was back in the index pretty early this AM." 

For some additional context there, the Wired piece discloses that Kahney was Wired.com’s managing editor and then news editor, until he left about two years ago to run Cult of Mac full time. This background in legitimate news (as opposed to content farming), coupled with Cult of Mac’s ongoing practice of legitimate news would no doubt be key indications of the site’s authority in search. 

Google’s Amit Singhal told Wired that Google "deeply" cares about the high quality sites, but that Google won’t manually change "anything along these lines."  He continued: "Therefore any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent…That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is."

There are a lot of site owners out there that feel they have been wronged by Google’s update. Most will tell you that they produce quality content. I guess as Google continues to add "layers" to the update, we’ll see how Google really feels about certain sites. 

Demand Media’s eHow was expected to be devalued with the update, but reports indicate it was actually helped, though several other Demand Media properties were hit. It will be interesting to see if these properties find their way back up into the rankings. 

Mahalo has gone so far as to start reducing its staff over the changes. It will also be interesting to see if Mahalo content finds its way back up, and if so, if those jobs are saved. Look at what EzineArticles is doing to try and get back into Google’s good graces.

The update has also led to some people losing their jobs. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks reports that Jason Calacanis-run Mahalo is canning 10% of its staff because of the impact the update has had on the site’s traffic and revenue. Stern shares the following points from a Mahalo email sent by Calacanis and Mahalo President Jason Rapp:

- (re: the google change) Despite those efforts, unfortunately, the Google changes have led to a significant dip in our traffic and revenue. It’s hard not to be disappointed since we’ve been spending millions of dollars on producing highly professional content.

- Interestingly, while the search side of Google has impacted us negatively, Google’s video unit (YouTube) continues to be our strong partner, encouraging us to ramp up our video production and publish even more of our expert video lessons with them.

Interestingly enough, this comes just a few weeks after Calacanis spoke out about content farms at Federated Media’s Signal event, where he urged advertisers not to support poor quality content.  

"You shouldn’t put your ads next to sub-par content," he was quoted as saying. "We will not make content unless we have an expert. Demand Media will make content if someone will take $10…Google is figuring it out. eHow makes Google look stupid." 

Of course it is Mahalo that was among the sites hit by the update, while eHow has seemingly stayed put, if not helped by the update. 

According to a Wired article, Google is "working to help good sites caught by the spam cleanup". This reflects a Twitter exchange we looked at between Cult of Mac publisher Leander Kahney and Google’s Matt Cutts. 

It remains to be seen, however, whether Google deems Mahalo one of the "good sites" or one of the sites the update was designed to target. 

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis has posted a lengthy explanation about how Schiefer was hired, and why he has kept him on staff until his sentencing (he’s also tweeted several times about the incident). What it pretty much comes down to is that Calacanis feels that he is a good judge of character and he thinks Schiefer was just a dumb kid when he launched the (failed) attack and has seen the error of his ways.

Calacanis also wants to assure users that their information is not in any danger. "John’s work is well-supervised. Mahalo follows strict security policies and we don’t store any sensitive data anyway (Even if one of our employees did go off the deep end, the most they would have access to would be your questions and answers on Mahalo Answers–not much damage can be done there since they’re all public anyway)," he says.

Even if nobody’s data is in danger, this incident is likely going to leave a large bruise on the trust and credibility of Mahalo. The fact that he’s keeping him on as an employee up until his incarceration won’t help this. Calacanis defends the company’s decisions to the end though, and is well aware of the backlash the fiasco is likely to bring upon him and his company.

Calacanis notes that a simple Google search could’ve prevented him from being hired in the first place, and of course kept the whole ordeal from happening. Yet at the same time, he conveys little regret about the hiring at all. He says he’s ready to give him a job again once he gets out of prison.

Even if Schiefer is a great guy and is truly reformed, I can’t see this sitting well with customers. Calacanis has taken quite a chance with this approach.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Rubel and Kawasaki, Rubel is SVP, Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman – the world’s largest independent PR firm. Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, and the author of eight books. Both are well known for their blogs "Micro Persuasion" and "How to Change the World", respectively.

The two talked a bit about Kawasaki’s company Alltop through muffled audio, and then shifted the focus to Yahoo!, who Kawasaki says "has its own share of problems." He said that if Microsoft offered him that much money, he would take it. He then went on to talk about all the PR pitches he gets.

The two of them spoke a bit about Twitter next. "Alltop would not be what it is without Twitter. Twitter has changed my life. It’s a weapon." Rubel on the other hand has trouble managing Twitter apparently.

Rubel asked Kawasaki if he would consider returning to Apple (he was once an "Apple Fellow"), to which he replied, "Apple doesn’t need me if it has Steve [Jobs]." He did say that Apple should be more open with the iPhone, and "let it all hang out."

The topic was shifted again, this time to Jason Calacanis. Guy asked the audience how many people used Mahalo. Only three people indicated that they did. The crowd erupted in laughter.

Finally, they talked about SEO, and Kawasaki gave his best piece of advice: "I don’t know much about SEO, so my philosophy is “Write good s***!"

WebProNews anchor Abby Prince-Johnson contributed to this article.

SES New York is here again, and WebProNews is there to bring you reports and videos from the Big Apple. Enjoy our coverage this week.

Calacanis’ presentation was less about snake-oil this time, and more about legitimizing white-hat SEO while promoting a new social graph he is adding to Mahalo. Calacanis assured the crowd that he meant no offense to the SEO industry in his last presentation, and admitted that his impression was more in line with black-hat SEO or, as he put it, "black magic" SEO, which is more about gaming search engines than legitimate site architecture.

"In some ways," he said, "I am an SEO. I’m a white hat SEO," so long as that means building clean sites.

Calacanis said Mahalo was built on a similar concept as DMOZ or Yahoo Directory, both of which he says failed in terms of search because the directories were "neglected." Calacanis believes Mahalo will not suffer the same fate because the Mahalo Greenhouse Most Wanted page, which distributes the work of building search results among 400 at-home workers.

He said Most Wanted trails only Wikipedia and About.com.

The problem remaining, he said, was keeping the content up-to-date, a problem he addresses by launching Mahalo Social, a social graph that allows users to recommend links and updates in order to build a trust score.

Then there’s the problem of user bias. Calacanis claims that, unlike Google or Yahoo, ranking in the results is up for discussion and review in public view.

The system is based upon machines, experts, social influences like friends, and the fabled wisdom of crowds. A search for Macbook Air, for example would bring up blogs, reviews, and sites like Stumble Upon, all of which are integrated into the social graph, which includes also Del.icio.us, blog comments, Wikipedia, and Digg.

Apparently not Netscape, though.

Using My Mahalo, a user can see at the top of search what friends are recommending in terms of movies, books, services, or products. No friends? No problem. The most "trusted" sources will be posted first with user-ratings posted along the right and bottom.

The idea behind this is that social information is more valuable in search than it is in the original destination like at MySpace or Facebook. The concept is more closely related to the semantic web, which relies more on human categorization, but Calacanis says an algorithm, which has yet to be developed, is important to the further development of the concept.

Part of this semantic integration would include the incorporation of information outside of Mahalo. For example, social information from GoodReads, a site for book lovers, or Netflix for movies, would appear in a networked search result. This of course, in light of recent Facebook privacy fiascos, would be on an opt-in basis.