It has come to my attention that the same three companies routinely appear on the top 3 spots in adwords. Upon investigation two of these companies share the EXACT same mailing address on their contact forms and the 3rd shares the same city which happens to be a residential address if you use google maps. These aren't your typical product sites either. I'm in the "design online" niche lets just say all of these three sites are heavily custom coded.
Upon chatting with Google about this I was sure this had to violate their double serving policy. One company shouldn't be allowed to rule the top 3 adwords positions. To my dismay there is infact a way around the rule. Operating 3 separate sites under the same keyword sharing the same physical address apparently didn't matter to Google, the important part was that the separate adwords accounts not be held by the same individual. It isn't hard to see how you could issue a few employees or family members company credit cards and operate like this to bend the rules. At the end of the day they are pumping thousands of dollars and very lucratively funneling sales into 1 of their 3 sites.
In my mind this is a huge exploit of the Adwords System. I'm curious what others think about this or have run into it before? I feel like we've hit a dead end at this point and must simply try to out bid them. The problem is that since they have 3x the chance of getting a sale they are at a huge advantage budget wise.
