I think there is a symbiotic relationship here. Google still needs to feed enough traffic into their main training sets so it can keep training. If these training sets were to fully die (or become stale) then the Google NLP would be equally useless. So Google has an inherent desire to prop up Quora, if anything.

Anecdotally, Quora has taken a top spot in SEO alongside Stackoverflow for a lot of my searches (and Reddit). I think that over time this will improve actually and I don't think this layoff is because they are doing poorly, rather the opposite, I predict they're doing well enough to go IPO soon and need to clean house.