Two domains with the same keywords reversed

[Asia_Expat]

I'm very confused about whether I can do this or not.
I have 2 domains with the same 2 keywords, only reversed and with differents TLD extensions, one being .info, the other being .org
I noticed one of my competitors has several similar domains but pointing to the same homepage (I'm not sure if the domains are on different hosts or not, or even if that would make a difference in this case).

So, what I want to know is can you do this safely? Is this considered black hat or grey hat and if so, how is my competitor getting away with it as they have very good traffic indeed.

I'm sorry if this is obvious but I keep reading conflicting informaion on this.

[Asia_Expat]

Just checked the WHOIS and it appears to be identical for both domains.

[Asia_Expat]

Well this is very odd. the site in question has 2 main domains pointing to it...

www.widgets-a.com
www.widgets-b.com

Neither of them appear to have a redirect on them but in Google, if you type site:www.widgests-b.com into the search field, it only produces results for www.widgets-a.com.

How does that work then?

[Webwork]

The only "safe" multi-domain strategies that I (imperfectly) understand to be workable (no guarantee) are 1) permanent redirects of the added domains to the main domain; or, 2) websites that are stand-alone websites with unique content which websites may - I emphasize "may" - employ "natural" linking patterns.

Unnatural linking of the added websites might be additional websites with unique content that only link to one (presumably) central or benefiary website or might include websites that link out to other sites (arguably to mask the network affinity) BUT that otherwise lack inbound sites. Other factors might include that manner in which pages between the sites are linked, how the intranetwork links age, etc.

IF it looks like an effort to game the search engine ranking algo (garnering extra "unnatural" links "looks like" such an effort) then you may safely assume someone somewhere is laboring on an algo fix to knock you out of the SERPs. (At least one hopes that there's someone doing that work.)

Frankly I'd counsel to invest more effort in making websites that have value, which value is reflected in people naturally linking to your website.

[Asia_Expat]

Naturally, I agree with you and I never really seriously entertained such a strategy and continue to write genuinely unique content for my site. however, the other website I mention seems to be doing very well out of this strategy, is little more than an advert site and almost completely dominates the SERPS... so much in fact that it's only natural to start thinking 'Maybe i should be doing this'.

I hope you're correct about the algo in development to change this, because I will continue to be white hat and hope it will favour me one day over my competitor, who also uses doorway pages (to their success)