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It's easy to spoof your IP in a HTTP header, but you will never be able to establish an HTTP connection that way. To spoof an IP, you'd have to hack into a computer that relays the packets between the host site and you, and reroute the packets destined for the spoofed IP to you. As said above, it's illegal (unless of course you own that computer or have permission).
All that being said, if the cloaked site has been cached by Google, you could check the cache. Also, you might want to try other cacheing search engines like Gigablast.
There are a couple of other top-secret methods of getting the cloaked optimized HTML (that sometimes work), but I don't want to give all my secrets away =)
Yeah hack the server and grab the code =)
it's very easy to decloak a site, no need to hack any server.
Trust me I've seen cloaks on google doing very well and 99% of users don't even know the difference.
I've seen them so good that many SEO's would miss them or just write them off as doing some sort of stat tracking
Is there any software to fake just user-agent in case someone cloaks only on the basis of user-agent.
I have found very interesting example in the SEO area, and I would be very greateful if someone could verify if the site is cloaking. Please send me a sticky mail so I will send back the search-phrase and their url. They currently run #1 in the local G.
Thank you in advance for help
Voyteck
noarchive tag
True but the noarchive tag is 'almost' a sign of cloaking and SEs have varying rules against the noarchive tag. We all knew that the noarchve is always open to abuse and SEs knew this as well.
There are good cloaking technique that 'allows' archiving but very hard to detect by average users.
But, it's only a programming and there's always a counter solution as long as the SE have the cache copy of the page.
Voyteck, if there's a cache at G then sticky me and I'll take a look at it.
If you look for the cache and Google and Yahoo both return an "error page not found" message ... is the site cloaking?
No.
Romino
Note that wget is a unix program, to use it you can get a knoppix disk or cygwin or (probably?) find a windows native version somewhere
While spoofing a user agent is easy, it is very difficult, if not illegal, to successfully spoof an IP address.
Is Google giving you a ban or penalty while cloaking and adding some more links for google-bot than normal users?
Banning is not necessarily indicative of cloaking - a lot of servers are set up so that robots which do not read / follow robots.txt are automatically banned. With a home brew googlebot one could inadvertently fall into this category.
Though you cant spoof your IP address, you can relay through an open proxy with an IP better suited for the task. As finding (and using) said proxy is generally not a permission based thing and rather inappropriate here, I will not elaborate.
I think there's little doubt they are cloaking. They are competing in a contest and have swamped sites that had previously been doing well with some underhanded techniques. What shows in Google's cache is not what shows when you visit their site.
It's probably one the most powerful tools out there for investigation, plus it's free.
