TheMadScientist - 4:25 am on Dec 15, 2012 (gmt 0)

even when searching for a very long hand written phrase that we have on our page and they do not.... coincidence?

But, it sounds like to me, you're still thinking search is 'keyword based' rather than, for lack of a better way of explaining, 'definition based', so if the competing site has a phrase that's 'algorithmically defined' to equate to the essentially the same thing as your phrase is about, then I'm not surprised at all, especially if you click on the page(s) from the competing site(s) to see if it/they contain the phrase more often than you click on your own site for the same query or type of queries ... That has nothing to do with Adwords spend and everything to do with the new algo we're dealing with.

I expanded on this a bit with a question in the 'All About the Links' thread [webmasterworld.com...] because it raised a question for me and I don't want to get way OT here in this thread.