AOL News has sprinted into a leading position in online news search, joining Yahoo News, Google News and Topix.net, writes SearchEngineWatch, citing July Nielsen/NetRatings data, according to which AOL News has a unique audience of 16.5 million. Though that's some 29 percent less than for Yahoo News (23.2 million), it's also more than 2.4 times more than the audience of Google News (6.8 million) and almost 6.8 times that of Topix.net (2.4 million).
How the AOL News algorithm ranks top news headlines or press releases isn't yet evident, but its unique audience of 16.5 million certainly commands attention. Of note for SEO and PR firms is that AOL News displays press releases in a separate section at the bottom of its news search engine results page instead of mixing them with thousands of articles.
Although powered by Google, AOL News also includes an AOL Newsroom section containing handpicked articles by editors who also add multimedia (video, audio or photos) and links to other relevant content on AOL and the web.
