Google has been fairly generous in its pre-holiday gifts. Along with a slew of new features to their search engine, the company generously offered inactive AdWords users a $100 incentive to start funding their ads again. Far be it for anyone to question the good intentions of Google, the noble ruler of the internet, but some suspect an ulterior motive.

The motive here has to do with the “cost per click” model that Google uses. When advertisers appear on the Google search engine, their exact position is determined by how much they bid per click. Dependent on the industry, high-ranking clicks will be anywhere from a few pennies to a few dollars. The exact price isn’t determined by Google, however. It’s determined by what your competitors are bidding.

Others even point to Google’s recent updates, most prominently the “Google Instant” feature and “Caffeine” caching modification, as a ploy to get more holiday advertisers. The idea is that Google may have released these sweeping changes to prompt websites who fear a loss in rank to invest in advertisement as a backup plan.

By bringing more advertisers in for the holiday season, the time of year that already sees the highest bids in Google CPC advertising, the company ensures that it will get the highest possible bids. While these efforts were made at the early end of the holiday season, Google saw a thirteen percent rise in overall CPC costs by the end of November 2010.

Whether or not Google is hiding a conspiratorial grin, there’s no doubt that it’s seeing a boom in advertising as we approach the end of the year. When compared to last year, the company shows a fantastic rate of growth. When compared to Bing and Yahoo, the company shows its dominance in the holiday advertising market.