I have an article site,

healthfitnessarticlesweb.com which s database-driven.

I found a sim-spider at http://www.totalheuristics.com/simspider.cfm to test the spider-ability of my site and it siad 'Cloaking: DETECTED'.

Not good.

A static (html dump) of the home page can be found here:

healthfitnessarticlesweb.com/tester.htm

Putting this through the same sim-spider it said 'Cloaking: None Detected'.

The site uses SE friendly URLs by directing all requests to the custom 404 page which does a database lookup and, assuming a match is made, sends a 200 OK along with the correct content.

Can anyone here point out to me what the sim-spider sees differently and how  can get round it?

Many thanks

I wonder if this might be what its picking up on ?

  <!--[if IE]>

   <style type="text/css">

.lh-col {

        position:absolute;

        top:180px;

        left:10px;

        width:210px;

        z-index:3;

}

   </style>

  <![endif]-->

I wouldn't worry about it anyway

I did wonder - but that bit of code is present on both examples and is perfectly legitimate (it fixes discrepancies based on how firefox and IE interpret CSS)

LOL
I REALLY wouldn't worry about it.
I just entered http://www.yahoo.com to see what it would say ... CLOAKING DETECTED
I thought it would do that considering the fleamarket-like content.
So then I got to thinking... what if a super-clean page was looked at... so I entered http://www.google.com and guess what....
WOW You're a good guesser... CLOAKING DETECTED

Ergo, the tool is junk

I have a few different sites that I am (of course) hoping will eventually be more popular..
I ran this tool against a few of them and the results on all of them is/was 'no cloaking detected'.
Granted, I am not trying to cloak anything but then, wouldn't Google.com be trying to setup the pages to redirect to the appropriate language should a non English browser hit the english version of the site?
I wonder if something like that would be considered cloaking...?

http://orange.whipnet.com

Oooo...  I'm cloaking too   At least according to that.  Of course I've hand written the code and KNOW I'm not cloaking.  I do have some dynamic content, but the search sites aren't gonna fault that, too many sites generate dynamic pages.

I wouldn't pay too much attention to that tool, it may be doing nothing more than flagging it because of the file type (php, asp, etc...) sounds like what happened with yours

EDIT:
I did a test with a simple php file, evidently it does more than just check the file type, but it does appear to flag it as cloaking if you have dynamic coding (anything that can change in any way due to different circumstances).

Yeah my sites are CLOAKING as well. Strange how we have SERPs in #1 rank for an excess of 300 000 000 in results (competition?).

Tool is crap... lock the post..we're outta here... :0}

It may be looking at our modrewrite stuff maybe, who knows. Not worth the time to figure out.