That would be bad, because it is proven (see Latest Search Marketing Benchmark Guide by Marketing Sherpa) that the appearance in the Organic top results and in the paid results as well increases customer response.

More than the sum of each lisiting by itself.

"Dominating" the Search Results and enhanced Brand awareness are the keywords.

Comment by Carsten Cumbrowski | February 28, 2007 12:35 PM

There is a potential benefit to being listed in both paid and web results on the same page, and that may even be part of the inspiration behind advertising on a phrase that you already rank for in organic results.

Even better would be to appear for a paid result, a onebox result, and an organic result on the same page.

Is there a point though, where a search engine might start considering that such a level of saturation of the same page within a search results page might be a bad user experience?

The patent seems to focus on the benefits of revenue generation for the search engine, and a willingness to remove an organic result to gain a click through on the ad. Yet, as the study you point out shows, it may be more likely that someone would click upon the ad if they saw both paid and organic results pointing to the same page.

Comment by Bill Slawski | February 28, 2007 12:46 PM

I was ranking a client #2 and #3 on Yahoo for a fairly competitive term. I started advertising with YPN and exactly two days later I was pushed down to the bottom of the fourth page.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist and don't wear a tinfoil hat, but given that I could not find any other reasons and the site had not been changed... It smelled a little fishy to me.

I know this is a Microsoft Patent you're talking about, but if there was one search engine I would expect something like this from it would be Yahoo.

Comment by Everett | February 28, 2007 1:19 PM

One of our websites www.palmdesert.com has been completely drop from google within the past two months. The site when live in 1996 and has always had top ranking in google and most all search engines for years. We started buying keyword from google in late Dec. 2006 and in Jan 2007 our organic listings started dropping off and today we are no where to be found. I have heard of this happening to others. Any input as greatly appricated.

Comment by Art | March 1, 2007 12:34 AM

>>a paid result, a onebox result, and an organic result on the same page

Greg Jarboe presented a study at SES several years back that observed dramatic click-through increases to both paid and your organic listings for a site when both appeared high up on a page. It's a situation I strive for with sites I optimize. I hadn't considered a one-box too, but I can see that happening fairly easily with some local searches.

If the study is correct, and a high organic ranking actually increases paid click-throughs, then I'd think that undermining this kind of symbiosis would be counter-productive for the engines.

Additionally, I've always assumed that paid and organic were like church and state... and that there was a line separating them that the engines would not cross. Simply as a matter of trust, I'd think, the engines should be very wary of doing mixing the two. Conceivably, the FTC would also object to what the patent suggests MSN might do.

Comment by Robert_Charlton | March 1, 2007 4:05 AM

We are seeing Yahoo mix paid listing into there organic listing with many of our ppc client ads. With the droping of www.palmdesert.com less than 30days after we began our ppc campaign make you wonder what there are truly doing. We also had this happen to a client that had good ranking and started running ppc.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Comment by Art | March 1, 2007 10:21 AM

If you look at the customer purchase cycle, a consumer doing research is more likely to click on organic listings and a consumer that is ready to make a purchase is more likely to click on the paid search listing.

By limiting the SERP to a organic listing or a paid listing, MSN will essentually be segmenting the users and subsequently advertisers.

Comment by Dangdatkat | March 1, 2007 5:03 PM

Moves by Google and Yahoo to rank paid listings on page quality scores as well as bid price to raise relevancy for end users also arguably make the line between paid and organic search less clear and give scope for similar muddling there.

Meanwhile, there is clear evidence of cannibalisation of organic traffic by paid traffic and vice versa alongside the well recognised impact of brand presence from visibility in both listings on overall click-through rates. Any filtering of organic results based on paid results would have a massive impact on the model for advertisers and the whole relevancy philosophy behind algorithmic rankings.

Comment by Shona | March 2, 2007 4:32 AM

I think it's really just a way to clue people in that Natural SEO as we know it, will cease to exist in the quest of those who control information to monetize ALL of the traffic.

My full analysis:

http://paidsearchmarketer.wordpress.com/?p=32

Comment by Jeff James | March 5, 2007 8:22 PM