Competing with doorway pages

[Bee159]

Hi all, it's my understanding that 'doorway pages' are bad practice. However, when googling for the services that our company offers, along the lines of '[service] [location]', businesses turn up in Google SERPs that outrank us purely with doorway pages.

Take this as an example:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=seo+dorking

One of the results is this company who seem to rank for pretty much every town modifier:

https://prioritypixels.co.uk/seo-agency-dorking/

If you look at their sitemaps you'll see thousands of these pages:

https://prioritypixels.co.uk/page-sitemap16.xml

All the content is slightly different but broadly speaking it is very similar. It seems that, in the short term, we can't compete with this company but we could if we employed the same tactics.

So my question is: is what they are doing really risking a penalty?

b1Lpp5

[Bee159]

Any thoughts, Mozzers?

[Bee159]

Have I finally found a conundrum that the great Moz brain can't solve?