SEO is not ( just ) dead but already buried
I cannot believe how much happiness and applause this " Manage upgraded sitelinks in the new version of AdWords Editor " post on the official Google blog brings in some online circles.
All I see here is the real death ( and burial ) of organic search results in the visible part of the first page of Google SERP
Like this ↓ is not enough
but imagine one ( or all 3 ) top advertisers adding few sitelinks to that enhanced campaigns and that's it folks - no more organic results.
Of course all this Google moves to take for itself as much as possible from the SERP's real estate could've been easily predicted if one remembers the so called golden triangle first researched by Google back in 2009 ↓
or, in their own words :
This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.
Last quote and last image via : Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye
To make things short - RIP SEO , long live CPC !