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Yes, you can cloak on AV and many do especially in competative areas.
The irony is that cloaking should infact improve the quality of sites in AV with the visitor being fed a site which has no search engine design constraints whatsoever.
It can be very difficult to determine wheteher a page has been cloaked if a good server side script has been used. But here are some pointers:
1)Title and description listed in the search results is different to those on the page you view + the page appeared/updated recently.
2) You, the visitor get re-directed.
3) The page from a search engine point of view is a dog and doesnt match any of the algo factors with poor link popularity.
Hope these help although none of them provide a concrete test. Sure that others will be along to add more info shortly.
Oh and one question Seth. As for spotting cloaking by file size differences, aren't many of the pages listed in AV old? I know that I have many pages that I've updated that will show different file sizes due to the fact that AV has not updated it.
Not that any of this really matters all that much, we get little to no traffic from AV anymore. The same site listed at #20 on google gets more traffic. Go figure.
If you think someone is cloaking, re-submit the page and begin tracking it. If AV refreshes and the differences in titles and file sizes still exist, then it becomes pretty obvious that they are cloaking.
However, even if they are, you probably won't get any where with turning them in unless the content they are delivering users to does not match the search term.
