Is it right that a competitor should have their homepage ranked number one for a keyword, plus their inner pages listed PLUS position two with the same inner page as is listed under position one. Is this a mistake? I would have thought that that is not helpful to searchers? or does google do this?
Do you mean that the first link to the inner page is a sitelink? It is common for Google to group two pages from the same domain together in search results. This happens when both pages are optimized for that keyword.
That seems like a bug 2 me, you are saying spot 1 and spot 2 are taken by the exact same site/page? It definitely sounds like a big in google, I have never seen that, but I cant be sure, I dont see why google would allow such a thing.
I would imagine that this occurs when a particular site is seen as an 'authority' site on the topic that is being searched. I have seen this before in Google, and that would be my only shot at an explanation. For instance, if I type in part of our company's name, we come up in position #1, with site links underneath, and also are at position #2 and #3. However, there are other sites, where our company name is found, which begin to show up after the first three positions. Our company name is also a generic term (and a mix of keywords/products we produce) for our industry. But because our name happens to be based on that generic term, and our name is all over our web sites, as well as the sites of others linking to us, we are seen as an 'authority' site on the term itself. Make sense?
This is not unusual, the internal page is the most valuable page to the SE. This is very common with Yahoo, less common to Google. This can also happen if the search term closely matches your competitors domain name eg. Google links (a site nav generated by Google and shown in the results).
I see this alot when the keyword I search is in the sites domainname. Its probably an authority site for the given keyword too
Google thinks the content on that site is valuable. So why shouldn't they help users find valuable content related to their search even if it is in different places on the same TLD? Right? Sure.
All domains can have 2 results for each individual search. Turns out that for the keyword searched both his pages are more relevant than anybody elses. It's a rare occurance, but it's how it works.