A few months ago, while performing some web searches on Google for ‘Foreclosure related’ keywords, I found some interesting things.

I found Reply.com advertisements all over the place. Reply.com now has foreclosures? Further investigation showed that they apparently have found a little loophole in Google’s double ad showing policy.

Google Adwords prevents individual companies from having multiple ads appear at the same time for the same keywords. This is called ‘double ad serving.’ This halts companies with deep pockets from buying up all the ad space for their niches. Makes good sense.

Lead generation companies such as Reply.com, who have no real product to speak of, have found a way to get around this policy and make some good money out of it. They are contacting companies in the different niches across the Internet with a solution to this Google policy.

In researching this foreclosure ‘double ad serving’ violation (at least the spirit of the policy), I have found that Reply.com ads are running in conjunction with the ads of their clients. For example a search of ‘Miami Foreclosures’ yields an ad from Reply.com to a splash page on Reply’s side. The user inputs a zip code ‘on the Reply.com’ and conducts a search for foreclosures. This search then redirects to a website such as hudforeclosed.com which had an ad running on the original search page of Google for ‘Miami Foreclosures.’

Feeling this was a violation of the spirit of the Google rules (how could it not be?), we contacted Google. Google took our information. Their policy is not to divulge the results of their investigation (huh?). We made our initial inquiry back in April and Google still has these double ad serving ads running.

I guess when Google has shareholders to answer to, the axiom ‘Do No Evil’ goes out the window.

It has also been brought to our attention that Reply.com is looking to go public on the stock market. I love the web. How do you go public without having a real product? Reminds me of a ‘show about nothing’ that was chosen as the most popular sitcom of all time.

This is a strange world we live in.