Mahalo forced to lay off 10% of staff after Google’s recent search algorithm adjustment

The human-powered search engine, Mahalo, has experienced a heavy fall after Google made recent changes to its search engine algorithm, wrote Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis in an e-mail.

“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,” said the Mahalo founder.

The search engine's traffic slump will result in 10% of its staff being laid off and a temporary stop on its production of freelance content .

Over the past week, Google has been battling issues with the quality of its search engine results. The effort to reduce the number of useless content farms appearing at the top of the results pages was welcomed by users, however the way Google's motives affected Mahalo displays a fine line between quality content and search engine optimized copy typically found on such content farms.

Mahalo first started out as a search engine but later evolved into a portal for affordable content. Over the course of its life, the website has been criticized for questionable practices, such as building hundreds of almost identical landing pages for very similar topics.

Many of Mahalo's pages have a reputation for being too SEO-friendly, and in many cases, it is clear that the site has abused the concept of a "landing page." Although Mahalo has taken some precaution to provide a level content that offers some value, the overall perception of rendering poor quality content remains true for many Internet searchers and organic SEO experts.

The current controversy Mahalo is dealing with was bound to happen, however the issue was brought on more quickly after the recent algorithm adjustments made by Google.

Google is the overwhelming favorite among search engine providers, dominating about 66% of the global search volume. It has created an extensive library of content that regulated mysteriously by freshly tweaked search engine spiders.