Is this a white hat SEO tactic?

[anthematic]

Hi, I just noticed this website

http://www.knobsandhardware.com

hosts pages like

http://www.knobsandhardware.com/local/hardware/California-Cabinet-Hardware.html

that are filled with permutations of products + cities. These pages rank for these long tail phrases.

Is this considered white hat?

[RankSurge]

The thing about "White Hat" is all up to how you define it. When any person looks at the page in question, it clearly looks like a spammy technique. Unfortunately, this method does work - otherwise people wouldn't do it.

I doubt this would pass any human review as being a quality page, and there are many legit ways to take the idea of the product/city page to make it provide a quality experience for the user.

[AdoptionHelp]

This isn't white-hat in my opinion, its grey-hat. Its a huge list that provides no benefit to anyone reading the page. On the other hand, they're only making their own site a nightmare, not anyone elses - hence the grey instead of black.

I'm surprised this ranks at all, this page should be recognized as zero quality.

[watkinsheating]

That's a funny pile of spam. Thanks for sharing!

Sounds like you're considering a version of this for your site? Even if it does rank, how well do think it converts? The only point in ranking is to convert and only a human can convert. Therefore any landing page must be first and foremost human-friendly.

I would classify this as gray hat but not the type of gray hat I would wear in public.

[NaHoku]

White - Only for the consumer.

Black - Only for the search engine.

Gray - Where most of us live.

That example is a dark shade of gray.  I mean who in their right mind would find that second example helpful?

[bradkrussell]

This is definitely grey hat in my opinion.

If a customer types in "Jamul Cabinet Hardware" and lands on that page, how many are honestly going to convert from there? I would anticipate their bounce rates to be huge.

You are better off selecting a few key areas/cities you want to target and create customised landing pages for each. Landing pages with useful information based on that location - that will convert a lot more than this crappy spammy technique.

[PPCnSEO]

This works and is quick/cheap to do.

The much better options is a well written page on each area.

This way each page is 100% optimised for the keyword and contains useful, local, relevant information.

Start with the largest areas (on search volume) and add a few more pages each week/month.

If you have a list of areas as large as this then use slightly larger areas and target the big town for the page but also make references to the smaller villages within that page. Means the higher volume is well optimised and the lower volume pages are semi-optimised on a relevant page.

Interlink each of these pages to 2-3 of the others to create low OBL, relevant, varied, internal linking - rather than a single page like above with links to all of the pages.