Mulitiple sites from same owner clogging results

[seaboy]

I'm at a complete loss as what to do with this, so I'm throwing it out for any help.
I'm working with an ecommerce site in a pretty competitive field, but there is an unscrupulous competitor who is taking up all the top positions with dummy sites.
For instance, we sell widgets, so he buys the domain names blue-widgets.com, widgets-r-us.com, etc, and has thousands and thousands of 'doorway-type' pages under each one. Each is hosted on a different c-class, with false WHOIS info, but with simple digging it's easily discovered that it is the same company (eg all the prices are the same, the Live Help id is the same, part #s are the same, etc).
On *thousands* of searches they are occuping 7-10 of the top ten results, and also buying Overture+AdWords with multiple domains, so they dominate there too.
We've tried contacting Google and Yahoo, to explain what is going on, but with no success.
Can anyone suggest anything? I'll be happy to sticky some examples if it will help. These are *hugely* popular search phrases that 10,000s are searched for monthly.

[blaketar]

The Internet is a business channel nowadays. You HAVE TO start becoming as scrupulous or better than your competitors to stay in the game.

If your competition was Wal-Mart and they had too many superstores in one location would you complain to the Federal Trade Commission? Probably not, your best bet would be to provide a better Service, Price and Support channel to customers than the Wal-Mart.

The same rule applies, just because this 'Business-Person' has more 'Locations' than you does not result in him getting more sales. Provide something better and the customer will Drive the Extra Mile or in this case Click on the Next Row of Results!

[seaboy]

ok, point taken, but we *do* provide better service, prices, and support. None of that matters if we can't get the customers to find us (or any other competitor!).
In your analogy, it's not that there are too many Walmarts, it's that they've rerouted all the roads to go there, at the expense of everyone else!

[blaketar]

So let them have their Roads! Most people on the net have 4-wheel drive and do not mind using it for off road capabilities. (There are billions of sites on the net and billions of people to network and link with. Their are only THREE major search engines)

Here is what I have learned, and thus far it has been working out fairly well.

First, My Golden Rule that leads to My Hopeful Golden Egg, Do Not Depend Solely Upon Search Engines!

Secondly, create a different channel for driving traffic to your site, other than Search Engines.

My Case in Point, until a couple of days ago before the launch of MSN Beta. Nothing I did put me into any sort of "Great" rankings (site is 8 months old). Thus I developed a networking with people all over the net I knew would spread the word. This has resulted in my site seeing traffic of 3000 to 4000 unique users per day and an average 60% return ratio. Now with the launch of MSN (still do not know why) I am getting 5000 to 7500 unique a day.

My Point is, I have no reliance upon the Engines! That competitor you struggle with will fizzle and your solid foundation will prove to be more concrete than what your competitor or future competitors could ever hope for!

[seaboy]

ok - we're getting off topic here. The point is that these sites are spamming, but carefully enough that it would take a couple of minutes to discover it, and I would like to know if anyone has any genuine suggestions for something constructive we can do - this has been going on for 3 years.

[PhraSEOlogy]

I think blaketar has given you some good advice and perhaps you should take the time to understand what he is saying.

You seem to be focused on the spamming aspect - which appears to be something you cant do anything about. Focus on things you can change.