Seeing cloaked content

How to see/check that a site is using cloaking?

[adwatson]

First of all, I have to assume a certain site is using cloaking. They regularly rank well for a large number of terms, usually with URLs that include the search terms. Yet when you click on the links, you just get their homepage. Not a redirect either - even if you're viewing the URL "somesite.com/widget-cloaked-page.html" the page you see is exactly the same as the home page.

The search terms don't show up on this page anywhere, not even when you view source.

When I check out one of these presumed cloaked pages in Yahoo Site Explorer, I see _no_ external links, only ~20 links to the page from other pages on the domain. And when I check some of these, once again they're all the same copy of the homepage.

Anyways, lots of detail for a simple question - but assuming this is cloaking, are there any tricks to see what the content they're showing to the search engines is? I'm curious!

[volatilegx]

You could check the search engine cache, if it exists.

You could view the page through a translator.

You could use Firefox and change your browser's user agent to match that of Googlebot's.

None of these suggestions are guaranteed to work. An experienced cloaker will have safeguards against all of these methods.

[adwatson]

Thanks - tried all those already with no luck. They must have someone good doing it. Just thought I'd ask to see if there were any other methods I didn't know about.