May 6, 2011 1:52 PM

Demand Media in Demand After Content-Quality Pledge

After months of insisting that the perception that “the quality of our content may not be the same or better than that of other published internet content” is “baseless,” Demand Media has now acknowledged that some of its offerings are not up to snuff. So, it’s taking steps to clean up its act. Among other […]

After months of insisting that the perception that "the quality of our content may not be the same or better than that of other published internet content" is "baseless," Demand Media has now acknowledged that some of its offerings are not up to snuff. So, it's taking steps to clean up its act.

Among other things, Demand is planning to hire more-experienced writers in a bid to raise quality. They'll produce articles as long as 850 words, for as much as $350 -- which isn't great, but better than zero. The company made the announcement on a conference call with Wall Street analysts Thursday evening to discuss its quarterly earnings, which were quite strong, sending company shares up more than 10 percent in after-hours trading.

On Friday, Demand Media shares had given back most of those gains, but were still up nearly 4 percent above Thursday's close.

Demand Media has had a rocky couple of months following its IPO in January. Less than 48 hours after the company's IPO, search titan Google announced an algorithm change -- code-named Panda -- designed to penalize spammy and derivative content, and reward original and high-quality content. Although Google did not name any specific companies, many observers from Wall Street to Silicon Valley believed that Google's move was, at least in part, directed at Demand.

Those suspicions were proved correct after web-search referrals to Demand sites plummeted 20-to-40 percent (depending on whose numbers you want to use) when the Panda change kicked in.

Demand Media's main content offering is eHow.com, which features helpful articles on topics such as:

"How to Conduct an Effective Meeting" -- "Preplan by determining who will be invited to the meeting, the purpose of the assembly, the topics to be covered and the information to be gathered and disseminated."
"How to Burn Types of Wood" -- "The methods for burning firewood for cooking or heat are similar for all types of wood."
"How to Store Clothes in Storage" -- "With different seasons comes the need for different types of clothing."

Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt demonstrated on Thursday's conference call that he is either a glutton for punishment, or a Zen Buddhist of the highest order, by actually praising the Google engineers whose algorithm tweak caused his company's search referrals to fall off a cliff.

“We think on this one they did a really good job,” Rosenblatt said, according to an account of the call by Forbes. “It seems like they put the best content up to the top and penalized the lowest-quality content.... Everything seems to be running through their system like it should.”

In addition to announcing plans to hire better writers, Demand said that it would shut down the user-generated content program on its eHow website.

Clearly, Rosenblatt is making the right noises when it comes to quality, because he knows how important Google is to his business. But as with so many things on the web these days, the ultimate arbiter of Demand's quality push may be Google's search algorithm, locked in a virtual vault somewhere in Mountain View, California, silently judging us all.