This can't be a good idea, or can it?

[Drill]

A friend of mind is in the piano business. He has a friend, John, also in the biz, who evidently paid someone in Canada a bunch of money to help improve his search engine rankings. Here's his website:

http://www.jkpiano.com/

Now, anyone that plays piano knows that the big-name is "steinway." since this guy is in Chicago, somebody would logically search for "chicago steinway". When you do that, John's is the third site listed.

When you use Google to check for info on this website: info:jkpiano.com - he doesn't have a whole lot of action going on. But when you check the links, you find him in the Google directory, in the home and garden section:

http://www.google.com/Top/Regional/N...nomy/Services/

And when you look at the directory link, it's this:

http://www.pin.ca/piano/

And low and behold it's his website, all over again.

And when you check out the root site:

http://www.pin.ca

You see that it's some sort of directory. And when you check it's rankings in Google, it's pretty good.

So my question is, have any of you seen something like this before, and is it shady? Am I missing something, or is this one "pin" site solely responsible for this little site, with next to no Google rankings, coming up third for a very popular search term?

[NobodySpecial]

I dont think its shady at all.. its probably the most common hosting setup out there to have 2 urls, a www.domain.com url and a hostingsite.com/username or /~username type of url... its been like that for ages.

chicago steinway is hardly a very popular term.. .

he's in chicago, and he sells, rebuilds, and moves steinways. Its relevant to the seacher.

[Drill]

Yes, but the thing is that they did not receive there good, or improved, rankings until they paid this company a bunch of money. Which leads me to believe, there may be something odd happening here. Besides, doesn't Google penalize for duplicate content? Anyways, I have a call into this company to see what they have to say.