netmeg - 2:23 pm on Aug 26, 2011 (gmt 0)

People use a "search engine" to get a number of DIFFERENT sites.

No they don't. They use it as a means to an end; to find something they are looking for. And once they find it, they tend to stop looking. Sure, some people comparison shop before a purchase, but that's only a percentage of the overall actual queries in a day. And some people here claim they would rather have a number of different sites, but that's an even smaller percentage. Most people just want to find what they're looking for and move on.

And an alarming number of them just type the company name or domain name into the Google search box. One of my clients gets around $5000-$6000 in orders every day *just* from organic searches on their domain name - including the ".com" part. And he's in a pretty small niche.

Moreover, in one sentence you say "It's clearly not just brand related" and then in the next you say "Push the organic results down" - well, which is it? My sites with the 12 pack links *are* all organic results; I'm not paying for those links (or any ads that run next to them), and I'm sure not a big brand. *I* pushed the other guys down by being the most authoritative result for the query; Google isn't artificially propping me up there. (Heh, in fact if they were deliberately doing that sort of thing, I'd probably be among the last on their list)