Is Google Digging Their Own Grave?

Within the past few months, Google has made some pretty wild moves to help their advertisers get more for their money.  But are they digging their own grave by worrying too much about the advertisers than the publishers?

The short answer to this question is - Yes.

Cause & Effect (speculation):

Cause:  Google changes advertising clickable region from entire ad to only text.
Effect:  A decline of about 7% in paid-click revenues from December 2007 to January 2008.

Cause:  Google updates Adsense display URL policy.
Effect:  Unknown.  As of this post, this change has not yet taken effect.  Effective date starts in April 2008.

While Google appears to be taking steps to clean-up the paid search results and quality of clicks on their ads, it is also hurting their bottom line.

Hopefully the ad-spending will rise in line with the quality of the visitors to their websites or we (Owners of Google Stock) are in for some hard times.  I am confident that Google will recover the short-term losses, but only time will tell.  I feel Google is mandating these updates so closely together so the effects are only felt in a single fiscal quarter before showing improvements through the higher dollar demands these better quality ads will demand.