Today's question comes from Landlubber in Colorado.
Landlubber asks a site for my client's.
Competitor shows up on a surf for keywords that never even show up anywhere on the site, not even hidden in the source code. How is this even possible possible?
And isn't this spam?
What can my client do about it?
Okay, landlord, let's take a step back and stop hating on everybody for a second.
Let's put it in the realm of universities.
Suppose I do the search cow.
A lot of people might expect Berkeley to show up because a lot of people call Berkeley, Cal.
Or if I search for Tar Heel, maybe I expect University of North Carolina at Edu UNC edu to show up, even if the word tar heel isn't anywhere on that page.
One of the things that Google pioneered was the idea of using anchor text to return a page.
So it could be that someone is linking to your competitor's site with anchor text that has that particular phrase.
Your competitor is not doing anything sneaky.
They're not cloaking, they're not hiding text anywhere.
It's not anything that they're doing.
It's just that's the phrase that happens to be pointing to their particular page on their website so that can happen many, many times.
Now.
It's always possible that your competitor is cloaking cloaking these days is a little more rare.
It's higher risk.
So people tend not to do it that much.
You can always usually fit keywords in naturally.
So people don't need to really cloak as much these days as they did in the old days.
If you wanted to, you could try pretending to be Googlebot and fetching your competitors website.
But frankly, I would probably spend my time looking to develop better content on my own website, beefing up the views of my own website, things like social media to promote my website rather than really kind of obsessing where that one guy is able to show up for that one ranking.
It can happen for anchor text.
It doesn't mean that there's anything sneaky or nefarious going on.
So I'd say just peace out, spread the love.
Don't worry about it that much and keep working on making your own website as good as you can.