I need some help trying to figure out what a competitor is doing. I have a competitor called Company X that has a website www.companyX.com. They don't rank particularly high in Google for hot keywords. But they appear to own another site, let's call it www.keywordY.com that ranks very high for lots of keywords. However, www.keywordY.com appears to have no actual content, all it does is display a quick splash page saying "Coming soon, Company X will have a new website to better serve our clientele" and it meta refreshes to www.companyX.com. According to the Google listings, there are many different pages on this keywordY.com, such as www.keywordY.com/keywordX-keywordY-keywordZ.html, etc. and they all display the same splash page and then redirect to www.companyX.com.
I cannot figure out what they are doing and how they are ranked so high if there is no real content. Perhaps they are cloaking? Another interesting this is that the snippets (description) Google displays on the SERPs are snippets from pages on www.companyX.com, even though the results are www.keywordY.com/whatever.html.
Any help here? I am guessing that this competitor is using some blackhat techniques on this keywordY.com site instead of directly on their companyX.com site so that they can avoid any negative penalties for whatever techniques they are using. Is that a fair assumption?
