Sneaky use of wordpress permalinks for better rankings.

Is there any benefit to this?

[JS_Harris]

I've had a new competitor seemingly spring up out of nowhere, it happens. I've reviewed his site to "see what he's got that I don't" and I was left a little puzzled, it's not a quality site and it's not getting ranking via copious amounts of backlinks and it also didn't appear to be using any sneaky tactics.

So what gives?

The only less than usual trait I was able to spot with my initial visit was the sites choice of permalink structure and I'm wondering if he's benefiting because of the set-up.

Normal, or at least widely used, site structure
- www.example.com/somepage.html for pages
- www.example.com/category/somepage.html for categories
- www.example.com/date/archives/ for archives

This makes sense, each page is found deeper within the site are you dig in categories and archives. It's a natural structure.

This guys site structure is...
- www.example.com/date/archives/somepage.html for pages
- www.example.com/date/archives/ for archives
- www.example.com/date/archives/category for categories.

This basicaly says that everything can be found in the archives folder and he's used nofollow on many internal links which seems to be boosting his archives folder in theory. The archives folder thus becomes a link page or sitemap type of page with a link to every article.

My question - is the site structure he's using in some way telling the search engines that his archives folder is ultra important and as a result his articles are getting a boost because of the odd structure on those?

[DilipShaw]

I dont think this should matter. I am sure there are other elements that are getting him good ranks. Stop worrying about this, and concentrate on your site for long term benefits.

[anallawalla]

For Pages I use www.example.com/about/
For Posts I use www.example.com/category/post-heading/

I don't expose Archives but I have a sitemap.xml.

There are many ways to set permalinks and the example you have seen isn't noteworthy. He may have achieved good PR sculpting but this shouldn't make much difference to ranking. Keep looking for other clues, such as the relevance of content, plugins used, etc.