To maximize their profit, Google has spent the last nine years aggressively working to increase the share of ads on each page in their search results, as well as working hard to keep as many clicks as they can within the Google ecosystem. If you want traffic, […] you’re going to have to pay for it.
The ad tactics on every other site have to get ever more aggressive, because search traffic is harder to earn with good content. It means that content publishers are moving toward social and viral traffic, because they can no longer count on search to work for them. It’s this addiction to social that makes the web dumber. If you want tonnage, lower your standards.