The AOL-owned video search engine known as Truveo isn’t doing so well.  The cause of the site’s poor performance isn’t a mystery to its president, however; in a very interesting statement, he quite bluntly placed the blame on Google.

Two days ago, Silicon Alley Insider published an article titled "AOL Ventures is Killing Truveo."  The piece documented a recent massive drop-off in traffic.  Truveo President Pete Kocks responded to say, "AOL Ventures isn’t killing Truveo – Google is."

Kocks later continued, "Starting June 16th, 2009, Google began removing all references to Truveo.com from Google web search and consequently our traffic took a substantial hit.  At that time, we were almost completely excluded from Google results  — not even the contact page on Truveo.com was available via web search.  The reality is that Truveo uses a number of industry standard techniques to increase traffic from web search and that Google is treating us differently than our competitors."

Compete statistics sort of back up Kocks’s claims, too.  Obviously, Truveo is having a traffic crisis.  Then, if you look closer, you’ll notice that Google doesn’t even appear on the list of Truveo’s top referral sites, whereas it’s number one where YouTube, DailyMotion, and Blinkx are concerned.

So did Google blacklist AOL’s video search offering out of spite?  Or did Truveo’s president overlook some sort of SEO-related reason for the change?  Have your say below.  A key point: either way, Kocks seems to have admitted that something’s killing Truveo.

AOL has named Kate Burns as head of its European Sales division where she will be in charge of ad sales on AOL’s properties.

Burns was previously Vice President and Managing Director, Europe, of AOL’s social media company, Bebo. In her new role, Burns will report directly to AOL Global Advertising and Strategy President Jeff Levick.

"Europe is key to realizing our mission of being the largest global platform for online display advertising.  Kate is the right person to build our European management sales team and lead this effort," said Levick.

Kate Burns

Burns has more than 10 years experience launching and leading a number of businesses in Europe. Before joining Bebo in July 2008, Burns was Managing Director of Dailymotion UK, where she was responsible for growing its audience, developing an advertising sales operations and creating partnerships with brands and ad agencies.

Burns was also Director, UK, Ireland and Benelux at Google, which she joined in 2001 as its first employee outside the U.S. She has also held sales positions at AltaVista and DoubleClick, as well as Ziff Davis and News International.

AOL has advertising operations in nine countries in Europe, including Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK. AOL had the second largest ad network in Europe in May with 173 million visitors, according to comScore.