Is my competitor doing something blackhat? - Cannot only access pages via serps , not from website navigation /search

[PeteC12]

Hi Mozzers,

One of my competitors uses a trick whereby they have a number of different sitemaps containing location specific urls for their most popular categories on their eCommerce store.

It's quite obvious that they are trying to rank for keyword <location>and from what I am see,  you cant to any of these pages from their website navigation or search , so it's like these pages are separated from the main site in terms of accessing them but you can access the main website pages/navigation the other way round (i.e if you select one of the pages from finding it in serps) </location>

1. I know that google doesn't really like anything you can't access from the main website but would you class this as blackhat ? / cheating etc ...  They do tend to rank quite well for these  alot of the pages and it hasn't seem to have affected pages on their main website in terms of rankings. I am just wondering , if it's worth us doing similar as google hasn't penalised them by the looks of things..

thanks

Pete

[Andy.Drinkwater]

HI Pete,

Before doing this, just ask yourself "If Google caught me doing this, could I explain the reason why"? Why are they doing it? It doesn't sound like it's to get great content out there.

I wouldn't condone anything like this because it is such an obvious attempt to try and gain favour on specific terms. Perhaps it will work for a while - perhaps they will be caught out if they were to be reported to Google... Either way, try and take a more long-term approach rather than something that is a probably going to be short-term win.

-Andy

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Pete,

Hmm ... it doesn't sound right to me, either. Almost sounds like doorway pages, though without actually seeing it, I'm not sure about that. It doesn't sound blackhat, per se, but it sounds like it might not be going in a Google-approved direction. I guess what you'd want to do here is to see if you can do something similar, highlighting your own most popular categories, without making them into navigation-less islands. Interesting topic!

[PeteC12]

Many thanks , I didn't think it looked like something google would approve of. Will stay clear of that idea then.

thanks

Pete