There is no doubt that the changes are a push for more revenue—and to be honest, there is nothing wrong with that. Google has to maximize shareholder value, and as a shareholder I want them to be able to generate more revenue. There are two issues here:

1. Is this move to generate more revenue going to decrease relevance?
2. If so, why can’t Google just come out and tell us that this change serves two purposes
a. Relevance
b. Revenue

I think the reason that people tend to attack Google when they make changes is they always say the changes are about relevance, when we all know (and understand) that they are not a charity and need to make money.

Google, why can’t you guys just give us the straight talk 

Yea it’s interesting how they are changing their tune on this one. Last year (August I think) when they changed how ads were promoted to the spots above the results (consider max cpc instead of actual cpc) they said:

“For the top positions above Google search results, we use a slightly different formula. First, only ads that exceed a certain Quality Score threshold may appear in these positions. Second, for ads that do surpass this Quality Score threshold, we use the actual CPC rather than the maximum CPC when determining their ranking in the top spots. This ensures that Quality Score plays an even more important role in determining the ads that show above the search results.”

Now it’s almost like they are saying “that dang quality threshold is costing us $$$ so we’re removing it so we can always have an ad above the results.” I;m sure in terms of revenue this will be huge for them. That top ad spot gets an incredible CTR and even if they were only not showing ads above the results a small % of time it had to cost them tens of millions in lost revenue.

In my opinion both changes announced today are more about $$$ than they are quality.

this was a tough one to sum up