I have a website like Foursquare, where users search for business in a specific location. The users can click on markers inside the map to view details about the companies/stores, and these details are opened in a dedicated page to each business.
I don't want users to go to these detail pages from an index page with a bunch of links for each business names, but I need to make this pages visible to Googlebot. How can I do this? Can I create an index page visible to Google only?
One way to do this would be with sitemap pages. These pages would have a list of links to all the business pages on your site. While you can't actually hide these pages from users, you can make them less prominent. For example you could link to them from the footer.
Another way to let Googlebot know about your deep content is through XML sitemaps. Your XML sitemap can be submitted to Google through Webmaster Tools and users will never know about it.
The problem with using either HTML sitemaps or XML sitemaps is that they don't do a great job of passing PageRank to your deep pages and getting those pages ranking well. While your sitemaps may get the pages indexed, for good rankings, you need some way of passing link juice to those pages as well. One way of doing so would be to link your business pages to other business pages. Some sort of "related businesses" list of links on those pages would be effective.
No, you can't do this. This is the very definition of black hat SEO. This is exactly what the search engines don't want websites to do. If you do this you will get penalized up to and including having your site banned from Google. This is a very bad idea.
It appears that you're missing the point of how Google works. If you want those pages to be found and crawled by Google, then you should want them found and crawled so that they can appear in the search results.
The logic then follows that if they display/appear in Google's search results then they are accessible to users, who will click on the links and land on those pages.
Now, you could "noindex,follow" those pages using the robots meta tag, so that they are crawled but don't get indexed. This may provide some internal link relevance that helps your site.
Any other method that provides content only for Google, and not for users, will be quickly acted on, either algorithmically or manually by Google, as it goes against their T's & C's.
