Two adword ads on one SERP, point to one site

Is it okay to have a second adword ad point to a redirect site?

[ikkyu]

I have a competitor who has owned the top adword spot for our main keyword combination for quite some time now. Recently he has created another adword ad(for the same keyword combo) pointing to another landing page. This page only has links back to his main site which is the one mentioned above. I didn't see it mentioned in the TOS for adwords but I would think that G wouldn't want all its paid advertising to basically point to one site, or maybe they don't care.

So is this acceptable or should I point this out to G?

[JKelly]

AFAIK, Googles system does not permit two ads to be served for the same keyword from the same account so the second ad must be from a different account. They do not permit the use of two accounts for the purpose of serving 2 ads, same or different, for the same keyword but proving that is in fact the case is not easy to put a stop to.

For example, they could be using totally different info on the 2nd account. Assumeing they have done this, then although the ad goes to a domain that has a link to the domain in the first account, they could be adding a affiliate id variable, real or not, and respond that they are an affiliate of the first ads domain and thus there is nothing wrong with what they are doing.

I guess it does not hurt to report it, but my experience is it is next to impossible to stop someone doing such as they can just keep doing it over and over as people have on words I bid on.

[Tropical Island]

I have a number of small local businesses with 2 and 3 page sub sites on one of my main sites.

There would be no reason that I can see for them not to set up an AW account in their own name with ads directly linked to that section of my site even though I have my own ads for the main site in general.

[ikkyu]

This isn't so much about affiliates having adwords campaigns for the same keywords, but one company having two separate accounts - the main site(which does have an affiliate program - but does not allow affiliates to do PPC advertising for their main keywords) and their new one-page, five-link site that all five links go back to the main site.

I could see that they could say its just another affiliate doing advertising, but if you do a whois lookup on both sites, they are owned by the same company. Would G look at the whois info and decide that this is not an affiliate but rather a duplicate ad?

[Murdoch]

Google does not allow two ads to be shown for the same query if there is a significant connection between the two sites, even if on different domains. For example, if www.widgets.com is advertising and www.bluewidgets.com has a significant amount of links going to www.widgets.com then that is in violation of TOS. I have had competitors attempt this many times in the past, through the use of affiliates, redirect domains, etc and I have been successful in getting Google to take all of them down for double serving.

Google does not monitor this, nor could they really even if they wanted to, so it is up to you to find the violating parties, gather enough evidence to support your claim and then report it. For those willing to throw up another throwaway page though, it is only a temporary solution.

[Langers]

[webmasterworld.com...]

[toddb]

The key is to check the whois. If they match it is easy to get Google to remove one. By easy, I mean 3-5 emails and a 2-3 month wait.