How to determine cloaking

[zaneta]

Hello everybody,

we just noticed that some of our competitors are described by google's results with text that cant be found anywhere in their page (current and cached).

What further checks do we do to make in order to be absolutely sure it is cloaking and be able to do something about it?

Thanks in advance and have a nice day!
Zaneta

[ChadSEO]

In addition to checking their site (including meta tags), also check their DMOZ listing, Google has been known to use that for their description.

[zaneta]

yes i just checked dmoz's enty of this site and you are right - dmoz seems to have the absolute priority in google.

Thank you very much for your answer!

[ChadSEO]

It seems Google can use

1) Page Title
2) content excerpt
2) meta tags
3) DMOZ listing

How it decides what to use seems to be based on what keywords were searched for, and matching phrases. There have been a few discussions around WebmasterWorld, feel free to search if you're interested.