A WebmasterWorld thread mentioned at Search Engine Roundtable this morning talks about Google's policy on displaying multiple ads from the same or affiliated company/person on the same results page.  Google says that multiple ads on the same page from the same company/person reduce the usefulness of the sponsored listings for users.  I agree.

So when it was discovered that Google itself was guilty of that very practice, it was quickly resolved and attributed to human error.  I believe that this one instance was just a simple oversight on someone's part.  So I don't really have any issues with.

But I do have issue with the enforcement of this policy in general.

A competitor of one of the sites I use AdWords for consistently bids on and gets 2 - 4 sponsored results per search results page for the same keywords.  They're using different domains for each ad, but it only takes a minute to look them up and see they are all owned by the same person.

I have tried many times over the years to get Google to notice what's going on.  I've tried to have the multiple listings removed a number of times.  So far, though… nothing.

This is an issue.  Either you can't bid more than once or you can.  It's an either/or situation and Google makes it clear that the answer is that you can't.  But if that's going to be their position, they need to back it up.  They need to act when legitimate AdWords users, who are following the rules, contact them about other sites that are violating their terms of use.

I'm not a fan of gray area.  If this is really against the rules, Google needs to answer me.  If it's not… they need to take it out of their official guidelines.