Title and Description not matching what's served

could this indicate anything other than cloaking

[mcjim]

A competetor of mine seems to maintain a number one or two position in Google and Yahoo consistantly. The strange thing is that the Title and Description are different on each in spite of the fact that the served and cached pages are identical. For example, on a Yahoo search for "some city real estate" this fellows page ranks number one. But the title and description text are nowhere to be found in the source code on either the served page or the cached page. Is there any other technique other than cloaking that would account for this?

[Span]

This is probably where the importance of link text shows. If 100 other web sites link to your competitor with "some city real estate" in their links, this could be the effect..

[mcjim]

Thanks Span... this guy has 634 inbound links including sheep farmers, widget crushers etc. More power to him. But how would links affect the Title and Description? I thought at least the Title would come from the <title> tag.

[volatilegx]

mcjim,

> from the title tag

I think you're right about the title tag but I don't have any evidence to back that up.

> Is there any other technique other than cloaking that would account for this?

1) Possibly a recent change to the web page that isn't in the search engine's index.
2) A dynamic page that changes titles or content without cloaking (such as shopping carts, etc.)
3) A redirect that perhaps you didn't see.

[Span]

Oh, wait a minute. I was under the impression mcjim meant the title of the page in the serps and the title in the cached version of the page were different. They should be the same, right? The title in the serps comes from the cached page.

[volatilegx]

Looks like I misread the original post :) That's what I get for speedreading.

If the title of the cache is the same as the title on the SERP, then the most likely answer is that they are cloaking and the cache is their optimized version shown to Google. Sounds like you've busted them.

[your_store]

Is it his homepage that is scoring? If so, you're probably seeing his Yahoo! directory title and description. It could also be a Sitematch thing, but my money's on the directory.

[mcjim]

Bingo Real Store. Mystery solved. The titles on the cache and SERP were different but the title on the SERP came from the Directory

Thanks