Cloaking used by the competition

analysis of your competitors

[stavs]

A question which has plagued me:

When one is studying the competition in an attempt to emulate their optimized structure, I often find websites which don't appear to be optimized and this leads me to believe that they are using cloaking.

However, in some circumstances its hard to tell - this is what messes up my feeble research.

1. IS there a way of discovering whether a particular site is using cloaking so that I can eliminate its structure from my research.

2. Better still, is there a way to view the pages that those sites serve up to the robots??

I am baffled - and impressed by this subject.

[4eyes]

One quick and easy way to spot 'lazy' cloaking is to compare titles, keywords and descriptions accross the different search engines on which they appear.

If these differ from each other and from those shown on the page itself, there is a good chance it is cloaked.

'Good' cloaking is a little more difficult.

[seth_wilde]

Here a very similar thread that you might find of interest
How can I tell a ranking is from a cloaked page [webmasterworld.com]

[WebGuerrilla]

In order to use the items 4eyes mentioned, you need to make sure the SERPS you are looking at are fresh. Quite often, the listing you are looking at is very old, and the differences in titles/descriptions is due to simple re-design or content changes.

I always like to re-submit the pages. Once the database has refreshed, if I still see major differences, then I know that there is a good chance they are cloaking.

You can also find another thread on this topic here.
[webmasterworld.com ]

[Air]

If you suspect that pages are cloaked, either because they seem to violate basic rules of good ranking structure or they exhibit some of the qualities mentioned in the thread Seth and WebGuerilla pointed to, it is best to ignore those pages.

It's not unheard of for SEO's to include a few "poisen pills" in the regular visitor version of cloaked pages.

From a research point of view it's better to look at results that rank between 20 and 40, they are less likely to be cloaked and will give you some idea of what page structure works best on certain engines.