Checking for cloaking

[seekjobs]

Hey Guys,

How can you verify a website is not violating Google's guidelines for cloaking?

Cheers,

LW

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi LW

At a very basic level you can see if a website is cloacking by looking at the page and then viewing the source code with a right click in your browser - are you seeing text in the source code that should appear on the site when you browse it, but you can't see it? This is most likely being cloacked.

Another way is to use the Lynx web browser and have a look at what it displays and then compare it with a browser such as IE, Firefox or Chrome. Lynx is a text browser for the worldwide web and has been used by many digital marketers over the years to get a flavour of what the search engines will see when all the styling and visual elements are stripped back. I would personally use this to check if you are concerned. Once again if there are differences in what text you can see in Lynx and another browser there is a good chance you are violating the webmaster guidelines.

<cite class="vurls">lynx.browser.org</cite>

Hope this helps..

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

In addition to this I would also like to recommend to use the: "Fetch a page" feature within Google Webmaster Tools. Under an account this could be found within the crawl section in the menu. It provides you with the option to see how Google views your page against how you would see the page. This could provide a valuable insights if you're cloaking or not.

Martijn.

[DougRoberts]

Also, you can try changing the user-agent of your web browser to "googlebot" so you can see if the site is doing anything sneeky when Google comes crawling.