AOL search referral decline -- does anyone know why?

decline in AOL Search referrals

[SG_guy]

Hi!

We noticed a decline in AOL Search traffic to our site from 15 Feb 06. It has now dropped to levels more than 50% below the previous average.

Does anybody has any clue as to what could have happened? A colleague of mine spotted some minor changes added to their sponsored listings, which is pushing down the normal search results. Could that be it, or is there more that I should know?

Thanks!

[wmuser]

Didnt heard anything,they must have updated their DB

[thuss]

We noticed the same thing! AOL makes up 3.5% of our search traffic and on Feb 15th search from AOL dropped down to 0.5%, however, search from Google went up around 3%. I installed AOL to test but can't find any obvious places that they are redirecting traffic to Google now so I'm at a bit of a loss.

-Todd

--
Todd Huss

[edited by: jatar_k at 8:50 pm (utc) on Mar. 1, 2006]
[edit reason] no sigs thanks [/edit]

[RichTC]

i can tell you why and its disgusting imo

AOL have increased the number of sponsored listings per page from 2/3 to 10 at the top and ten at the bottom - so if you were ranked in say position 7 for a keyword search you are now 17. if you were 11 you are now 31, you get the idea.

The more competitive the search term, the more sponsored adverts google will supply them with - the conclusion is that aol are not interested in providing quality search results for users just making money from the search facility.

They may as well just list sponsors only, its the next best thing for them!

Waste of time - it was a great search facility before now its a sponsored ad search.

[Robert Charlton]

AOL have increased the number of sponsored listings per page from 2/3 to 10 at the top and ten at the bottom...

On the AOL serps I just looked at, it still looks like three at the top and three at the bottom... and they're very clearly marked.

[RichTC]

Rob,

must be the keyword,

i just tried it and it returned 7 sponsored adverts followed by 10 serps and then 4 more sponsored at the bottom.

Position 11 in the old aol serps for this keyword i just tried is now 29.

[calvinhobbes]

Here's another data point: we also saw a sharp, significant dropoff in AOL referrals beginning on February 15.

[Flynn]

Same deal here with both of our sites...Feb 15th is the exact date referral traffic went to hell