Multiple Sites Maps

How many is too many?

[sid560]

My competitor is a master an internal links. His latest method of getting plenty of internal links is to have sitemaps in every state directory. The sitemaps covers the whole country, not just the state. In fact, they are heavy on keyword stuffing and has about six links with different key word titles going to every page.

It looks like they have over 90 different sitemaps. They do show up as back links, keeping them number one in google.

Is this against the google rules? I am not going to follow down that path myself, but just wonder if they will eventually paid the price for this practice.

Any comments?