Overture oks duplicate content sites...

for the same company.

[eWhisper]

There have been a lot of posts in the past about people having duplicate sites to manipulate the bidding in Overture. I'd always thought this was unacceptible in Overture, until this evening.

Overture just finished an investigation of several complaints made against several competitors, all who have either multiple sites with identical content and links or other sites with similiar content and all link back to the same site in the end (i.e. If you built 5 sites with slightly different content, all leading to the same site before you can actually make a transaction or schedule an appointment).

Some of these sites are even registered with the identical whois information.

They found that these are legal arrangements by their TOS, and told me that if I made 10 sites, just to make sure the content was slightly different, and that one link on the entire site was different from the rest, and that I would pass Overture's review if anyone filed a complaint.

Guess it's time to make a dozen new sites this week...

[Tropical Island]

This is just another indication of the mindset of the people running Overture and their desperate need to keep adding revenues without any moral restrictions.

They will eventually doom themselves to the fate of other well known paid search companies that destroyed themselves with total lack of concern for their advertiser base.