AOL (NYSE:TWX) has re-branded its Netscape social news ranking site as Propeller.com (not online yet). As we noted last week, AOL had pulled the plug on Netscape’s 14-month experiment as a Digg-like news aggregator after finding that users didn’t accept the change. Netscape has since gone back to being a general news portal, similar to what’s on the AOL main page. In a Netscape blog posting announcing the update, Tom Drapeau noted that the Propeller site is not live yet and didn’t offer a time when the new site would materialize.

SEE ALSO: Netscape.com’s Social News Experiment Dies, At Least For Now

In his post last week, Rafat speculated that the Netscape site would eventually be merged with AOL News. As for Propeller, Loren Baker at Search Engine News said that since the site has no back links currently available, Propeller “will not initially drive the same SEO rankings and PageRank 7 power links as the old Netscape.com did/does.” He expects that at some point during its development, it will build connections with news sites and blogs within the social news sharing and ranking arena, “especially with all of the Netscape redirects and expected links from AOL properties.”