WebProNews

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.