While keeping an eye on my compition, I seen them shoot suddenly to the #3 spot for the search term 'homeschool academy'. So I started checking out what could have given them this spot. The only thing that I can see is when you do this site search with google
site:heritagehomeschool.com
it shows that they have 450 some pages. I know that their site doesn't have near that many pages, probably around 130. When you click on the links google returns, most of them go to the same page.
I hope someone here can put some light on this for me.
Thanks

Maybe re-designs
site.com/v1/
site.com/v2/
Then when v1 becomes redundent, (design changes or whatever) they reidirect to the v2

and so on, so on.

Wouldn't Google catch that though and penalize them? I mean ... that is duplicate content then right?

This is correct, but NuWeb.co.uk on google, has many many different versions.

They can not penalise for a re-design i do not beleave.

Yes some links do go to the same page. It's their 404 error page

Check the headers for the URIs.

So how are they getting 300 pages to go to the error 404 page? In the search results there is a different URL that always ends with a - something like these:
home-based-education-ly.htm
home-schooling-requirements-it.html
curriculum-ast.html
home-schooling-ot.html
and it goes on and on that way. It really looks to me like they are scamming google with their use of keywords. Also each listing in the results has a different descritpion which has no relevant content on the actual page that it links to. Each listing is stuffed with keywords. I know it says on the page "The page you requested could not be found. Please contact us with the information below if you have any questions." in bold in the middle of the page. But the page is labeled 'Contact Us'.
I had sent in the form that Google has to report scams and after a week or so the results had dropped to 138, but now they are right back up there to 458 and it grows by 5-6 pages a day.

So how are they getting 300 pages to go to the error 404 page

I beleave its their OLD pages, that have been deleated, obviosly if they can not be reacherd, they will be dorwarded to the erm, 404 page.

They never had that many pages to begin with. Until recently they had 35-40 pages total. Then they added pages about homeschool rules for each of the fifty states(+50 pages) and about twenty or so articles (+20 pages) about homeschooling. Thats It. There's something bogus here.

hmm maybe.
Email them and askk, lol