Cacheing of cloaked pages

[tacheman]

Hi,
In the past I have read that so as to avoid detection, cloaked pages should include the noarchive tag so that their cache doen't appear in the search engines.

However, I'm observing that sites in the top positions for highly competitive terms arn't using the noarchive tag and therefor suspect that google is in some way penalising sites using noarchive.

I assume that some of the sites I'm looking at are cloaking but the cache appears to match the non-cached page and so I'm a bit confused as to how they're achiving this.

The only solution to not using the noarchive tag that I can think of it to use a javascript redirect but somebody looking for a cloaked page could clearly see what was going on.

Does anybody have any thoughts about my observation and suggest any alternatives?

Thanks.

[MrSpeed]

Maybe they aren't cloaking and don't need to. If there is a site at the top for highly competitive terms they got there with more than on-page optimization.

Have you looked at backlinks and the text inthose backlinks? What about PR?

[tacheman]

Thanks for replying MrSpeed. Yer, you could well be right, maybe the sites are there due to their amount of backlinks (the ones I checked certainly had a lot). But, compared to a year ago (roughly when I last checked), there are far far less sites using the noarchive tag.

I seem to remember reading that most sites in the top positions for competitive terms are there through cloaking. Maybe they have lots of cloaked domains that they point to their non cloaked domain so as to focus pr?

If I were to decide not to use noarchive tag what other techniques could I use to prevent users from viewing the cache of my page? Or am I stuck with it?

[volatilegx]

You could try using a JavaScript or meta tag redirect but Google penalizes those.

I've also seen people using a JavaScript/CSS combination to present a copy of their human version of the page in a <div> over the top of the optimized version. Of course, this doesn't really protect the source code, but it goes a long way in making somebody think the cached page is the same as the page in the SERP.

[tacheman]

I hadn't thought about using CSS to hide text. I think I'll try both no archive and CSS methods on different domains to see how they compare.