travisk - 10:33 pm on Apr 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

Too much oversimplification here.

Don't think "traffic". Think "user behavior". If 100 visitors search for "widgets", click the first site (which happens to be the most popular), but then return to the search page and click on the third site (less popular), but then never come back to the search page, the search engine may use that AS A FACTOR indicating that what the searchers were looking for was found on the third site, not the first.