Compeditor has begun cloaking

[Bennie]

We have a compeditor whom is a fair seo at best, I know he cloaks but until now I have not seen evidence that he can get it to work. We are in a compeditive industry and good quality links still reign supreme for now.

Today I found his SEO site and a speal about ip cloaking. I also have noticed he has entered the SERPs for some other less compeditive terms (only in G) with an unfinished site. When you do a link query his page on cloaking comes up as one of a few backlinks, LOL.

My question is as follows, how do I dig deeper? He uses no cache tag and this is kind of like taking a sword to a gun fight (to quote Tim Mayer).

Or has the time come to start cloaking our client sites too? We already dominate the SERPs without cloaking but smaller client sites get lost in the mix of larger portals and they deserve a part of the pie.

Do you think this cloaking will be noticed? I know if we start cloaking it will definately be noticed! Do we deserve 16 of the top 20 as per the days of AltaVista.

Are we too paranoid and actually watching a transition from sword to gun fight. Or should we carry on and prey that he wipes out.

Speculation Welcome....

[keywordguru]

There are many ways to go about digging deeper. The biggest stops are exactly what method he is using. There are some methods that will tell all, and then others that don't leak much.

If you want to sticky me the domain i'll be sure to let you know what I find.
Thanks

[JamaicanFood]

I think it is definately taking a sword to a gunfight, I'll actually take it a bit further to say, its actually like a pin vs. an atom bomb.

But what to do should one do if the competitor begins to cloak and you cant get anywhere, do I also cloak I guess I wont have a choice

But there must be an art to cloaking what are the steps and process involved...

[DoppyNL]

If you can simply see that he is cloacking in a bad way for the search engine's, report it to the search engine's.
They will probably do something about it and thus removing his `advantage`. If he cloacks on other domains then his primary site, his primary site will probably not be removed, but still, the cloaked site's will.

Requesting pages from his site while pretending your a googlebot for instance might help finding out if he is cloaking; Firefox has an extention that allows you to do this quite easily.

Also, take a look at the whois information of other domains he is using, if they are the same there might be a chance searchengine's also take down the primary site from their index.

I would use a personal adress though, one wich is not traceable to your site :).

[Bennie]

I have used the developer extention to firefox and the link extension to find the links off the page - very interesting indeed. Is this what you mean DoppyNL?

The links visible on the page deep link a client domain as well as hidden links linking to a cononical off his main SEO domain which the site sits on, oh oh.

I know the guy is not in the country (i emailed him and got a autoresponder). I have SPAM reported him to G, and I am definately not holding my breath....

Any more advice greatly appreciated!

[kellyandsummer]

If you have a primary site that only gets visitors from PPC, and you cloak an alternate (throw away) site to direct visitors to your primary through regular searches, I don't think it matters if you are found out by Google. What can they do to your primary site in that case? They'd just be blacklisting a site that wasn't ranked in the free search section anyway. And my guess is, they won't blacklist the primary domain from continuing to use adwords b/c they'd lose revenue.