What IS traffic, anyway?

I have to correct your post, Vittorio.

In my experience/observations, the new search hasn't changed in its use of traiffic as a ranking factor. Traffic has 12 html lists (pages), and the more traffic a place has, the more of those pages it is listed on, and linked from. It is those links that count in the new search, and I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that anything has changed concerning them. Your suggestion that high traffic used to get high rankings in the new search is mistaken.

I can't say one way or the other whether traffic's influence has changed. All I know is that the places that come up on the first page of most of the keywords I advertise under have 40K+ traffic. I have no way of knowing if this is cause/effect or just a correlation.

It could be that the people who organise those high traffic figures are also the ones who know how to move up the rankings.

I've my own SIM's and can do tests with parcels, so i can test each parameter to optimize the position of my "main" parcel (where i own my shop). I've did extensive tests changine the traffic (from 1000 to 25000), awaited days for each parcel to be sure to have been crawled correctly, i remain in the same position whenever i do 1000 or 25000 of traffic (indeed: without changing all the rest!)... the only differenc of ranking higher is to receive some backlinks (from the top pages), they are not enough at all... you need more and more to move in the search engine (especially on top ranks).
Phil is completely right: usually the ppl that cheat the traffic are the same that know how to optimize the new search engine.

That's right. Changing your traffic like that will only get you a few extra links, which will have only a small impact on your ranking score - unless you don't have many other links, that is. What you were mistaken about before is that is was different at the start of the new All seach.

Exact, i've some data here, the traffic from the start paied back you at least 40% of the scoring, so to get higher you only had to increase the camping/bots, but after 3 weeks LL starts to tweaks the bus, decreasing progressively the impact of the traffic on the new formula.. so we ended at least a month ago, when the traffic started to count almost nothing. Anyway they are still adjusting it, it is a hard challenge to always follow the new "weights".

I am only speaking theoretically, but it's quite possible that LL occasionally changes how different metrics weigh against the total score. For example, maybe the traffic links account for 50% of the total score today but only 25% tomorrow. The number of links may remain the same, their significance to the rankings just changes. So I do think it's easy and possible for them to do this, but I haven't felt evidence of it.