The battle between Google and webmasters, quality content versus what makes money fast, continues.

Search Engine Roundtable picked up on discussions humming along at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint. At both sites, webmasters believe they have been hit with a “Google Slap,” an increase in keyword bids stemming from Google’s believe a site violates its AdWords quality guidelines.

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(Photo Credit: DigitalPoint )

“The reports all come from advertisers noticing a major change in their minimum bids as of yesterday, March 5, 2008,” Barry Schwartz wrote.

Minimum bids for ad groups began hitting the $10 mark, to the chagrin of posters on those boards. Google’s action deemed their sites of Poor quality, meaning unless the pages/sites in question receive fixes that Google approves, those bids will stay high.

“They are trying to milk out more money per click,” one DigitalPoint poster fumed. “Especially after that Comscore erroneous article put their stock in a tailspin a couple weeks ago.”

The simplest answer could be the correct one: Google just got around to reviewing the sites in question, and penalized them as per AdWords terms of service. Commentary on the boards doesn’t suggest the sites being Google Slapped were of exceptional use to their visitors, high click-through rates or otherwise.

If they were, I think we would see webmasters publishing links to the sites with the newly-administered $10 bids, and demanding someone point out what Google might dislike about those pages. That isn’t happening, though.