Legality of two sites from one company

Hello,

Is it legal to advertise two different sites through Google Adwords that are both operated by the same company?

The sites would be different cosmetically: color, fonts, etc. as well as maintaining different navigation schemes, however they would share a common database of products.

I assume the answer is no as it would be easy to blitz an entire keyword market by spawning 8 different sites and paying for the #1-8 positions, but I thought I would let the experts weigh in.

Your response appreciated . . .

That would violate the AdWords double serving policy.

More info: https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=14179

GuyFromChicago is correct, it is against Google's policies, but it is certainly not illegal. It is also done all the time. You just need to disguise the ownership of the 2 sites. Have them registered to different people and have different credit card holders pay for the 2 different accounts. I've seen companies have over a dozen sites bidding sperately for Adwords.

Also keep in mind, Adwords is not like ntural search. Google WANTS you to spend more money buying Adwords. So, when you get caught breaking the rules, you don't risk being banned forever. You just have to get in compliance if you want to play. With natural search, create a few hundred doorways, cloak them and get caught, and chances are, your main domain will not see the light of day for a VERY long time.

yep, don't forget about the IP address that's used to check the account(s), the billing address associated with the account(s) and credit card(s), etc, etc.

Google's actually pretty good about filtering these folks out...although news ones pop up all the time.

There might be some advantages to doing this but it sounds to me that you are doing a lot of work to bid against yourself.

Thanks to everyone who contributed. I think I will try it out and see what plays out. The obvious advantage is a larger market share in a keyword market we are already succeeding in.

Worst case scenario we will have a second site that we cannot advertise. At the same time, nothing would prevent us from optimizing and gaining placement in the organic serps. Best case scenario - no one will realize that we have doubled our visibility in the paid results.

Thanks again . . .

If Google doesn't find your sites (for which they will not do anything to stop is my guess) then you can be pretty sure that someone else will and report you to Google since it is pretty simple to do nowadays. All you need to do is to click on "Ads by Google" and then reports the violation.
Google has a staff that checks the violation reports so before you do what you plan you better think it over