Cloaked Competitor Stealing Content

How would I even know?

[Buddha]

I read on another forum of a black hat that showed he could steal the position of a competitor by triggering the dup filter and using cloaking to hide it.

If a competitor were to do this, how could I prove that this was happening? Would I have to check the google cache of each listing? What if they don't have a cache?

[rominosj]

check his real html content with this tool:

***

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 8:13 pm (utc) on June 9, 2004]
[edit reason] thanks - no tool sites please. [/edit]

[4eyes]

check his real html content with this tool:

How? That is just a spider tool, not a 'magic' IP spoofing tool.

Assuming he has prevented the Google cache, the easiest way is to
search for a peculiar phrase that is included in your site but nowhere else.

If he appears in the SERPs, that phrase is present in the content spidered.

[thing3b]

Become google?
How About:
[google.com...]

[volatilegx]

thing3b, that tool doesn't work on any of my cloaked pages...

I don't have the Google translators in my list of Google spider IPs.

I read on another forum of a black hat that showed he could steal the position of a competitor by triggering the dup filter and using cloaking to hide it.

I don't think it works that way. If Google has a site indexed, and then a second site comes up with dup content, it leaves out the second site. It doesn't replace the first site with the second. Cloaking is irrelevent here.

[MarshallClark]

I think I know the example that Buddha was referring to. In that case the cloaked site had a higher PR score than the original site and so it was able to replace the original in the index.

[Buddha]

MarshallClark,

You are right about the example I am refering to.

Google should check original content by date of inclusion in index, or else this could become a big problem.