How to detect cloaking

Detecting 3rd party cloaking

[nrgnrg]

Is there any known way to detect that someone is actually cloaking. For example, let's assume that I get alot of hits for a keyword and the keyword appears nowhere on the web page or metatags. It would seem most likely that there is cloaking. But how can I confirm the cloaking without any doubts.

PS Would it be possible to mimic a spider so that cloaking is detected by simple comparison?

[Receptional Andy]

You can use spidering software to mimic what a spider sees (there are some freeware ones available) you might even be able to pretend to be a particular search engine ;)

However, most of the cases where I have suspected cloaking have always turned out to be incoming links or something else. Or their cloaking was too clever for me ;)

[nrgnrg]

Can you provide the names of some of the freeware that you are referring to for detecting cloaking? Also, can someone please explain how incoming links are recognized by a spider? What exactly do you mean by "incoming links"?

[Receptional Andy]

By incoming links we mean the text used in a link pointing to your site. So, if I link to www.widgets.com and the text the user clicks on to go to the site is "broken widgets", then the search engines conclude that the target site (www.widgets.com) is about "broken widgets". If there are lots of sites doing this, then the impression built up is much more powerful. So, a site can rank very well for search terms it doesn't even have on the page!

The software I mentioned is not specific cloak finding software, but spidering software which you will need to set up to imitate an SE spider in order to try and catch cloakers. One such spidering program is available here -
[spadixbd.com...]
or here
[httrack.com...]

Mostly these programs are intended to download websites, but they have other uses.
You need to setup the user agent etc. you send to the site in order to mimic a search engine spider, and get the site to return the spider's page rather than the users page.

[JayC]

By incoming links we mean the text used in a link pointing to your site. So, if I link to www.widgets.com and the text the user clicks on to go to the site is "broken widgets", then the search engines conclude that the target site (www.widgets.com) is about "broken widgets".

Sometimes you can use the Google cache to determine if that's what's happening. For example if in the case above the page in question does not have the word "broken" anywhere on it, if you view the cached version of the page from the "broken widgets" serp, you should see something like this:

These search terms have been highlighted: widgets
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: broken