Detecting Cloaking

How do I know if competing site is cloaking.

[mistah]

A competitor of mine has launched a new website and is suddenly ranking extremely well for certain search terms despite the fact that they do not occur on the text of the page. Also, there are no external links to the site listed on Google or FAST. They are not listed in DMOZ.

I have looked at Google's cache of the pages in question and when I view the html it does show the keywords in some of the "alt" tags, but nowhere else. However, I also notice that this html has been generated on the server side, as the pages are all .asp files.

Is it possible that they are using a sophisticated type of cloaking? If so, how do I detect it?

[ikbenhet1]

No, the cache is the way the search engine read it. There is no other code...

if they use "redirect" just right click cache button and click "save".

[mistah]

Thanks, ikbenhet1.

In that case, they're not using cloaking. I can't figure out why they are ranking so well. Maybe they've got some high PR anchor text linking to them which isn't showing up on Google's backlinks yet.

[airpal]

Please sticky me the URL/keyword of the site, I'll investigate further for you. Thanks.

[cyberair]

That happened to me too. This cheap website with no content at all all of a sudden got #1 and #2 position in my main keyword. I don't understand what happened, they don't have pagerank, and there's only 2 sites linking to them. I noticed that their Alexa traffic rating soared in mid August of this year, and keeps sky rocketing to a current position of 15,000. I am seeing this in many overnight directory sites.. is their a cheat out there that is giving advantages to overnight directory sites?

[jmartin]

If the cached page is different than then one served to you by the site itself, its possible they could be doing the classic bait and switch. If they are identical and you've looked at the HTML from both the cached page and a live page on the site and they match, then its probably ok.

How it works is, you use server code to sniff out the IP or user agent being used by examining the HTTP header request. Since googlebot always announces who it is and what IP it has (like all good spiders do) its very easy to dish out one page to googlebot and another to a typical user. The "smart" people who do this set there page up not to be cached.

Good luck to you!

-J Martin

[mistah]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

The HTML code on the cached version is pretty much the same as the live page, so it seems that they are not cloaking.

Maybe they are getting a boost for being a new site or something.