Big 1-Day Traffic Surge from AOL

How does AOL promote sites to its users?

[mattur]

A non-commercial site of mine had a massive one day traffic surge last week (~3,000%!), all coming from *.aol.com. The logs don't show any referer for these visitors, so I'm trying to understand what could have prompted this surge.

Does anyone know how AOL promotes sites to its users? Does the AOL client have some type of links panel or could the site have been a listed in an AOL email (presumably read in a dedicated mail reader rather than webmail)?

[jeremy goodrich]

A desk top mail reader of some kind perhaps? Or maybe in some content thing?

[MarieC]

It's possible that your site landed in a cool sites newsletter or something that was sent out in e-mail to AOL users. These newsletters aren't necessarily sent out by AOL, but by other AOL users.

[mattur]

Thanks for the replies, folks.

I've now had confirmation via an AOL user that AOL put a link to the site on their main login page (presumably in the AOL client, so no referer).

The link was along the lines of "look up your criminal ancestors!", which I s'pose explains why it was so popular ;-)