So I am looking at a competitors home page. He only has a flash video, a few images, and a little text. But when i ran a Google Bot tool....the spider sees all this text that I cannot see. Also the text is in the source and there are <h3> tags...but again I see no <h> tags on the home page when I use my webmaster tool bar. What am I missing.....
Without a link it's hard to help. If you are seeing more text when you use the View Source menu option in the browser context menu, it could mean your competitor is hiding text from the human eye using CSS styling, for example, to colour the text font the same as the background.
First of all, I don't think google is very fond of what your competitor is doing, if he is indeed doing that. Second of all, if you competitor is smarter than you, then that's too bad. It's not like we can magically make you smarter... you can ask a more specific question and we might help you, or you can search through the forum and gain some knowledge.
Sometimes the text is made hidden using the same color as of the background. So try using CLRL+A to select the whole text. May be you will be seeing that.
If what you say is true then your competitor is likely using hidden text. This used to be done by putting white text on a white background for instance. Google has gotten pretty good at detecting this... so now people use CSS to do it. They will include the text in the source then hide it with their CSS. Either way, it violates Google's Webmaster Guidelines. You can report them to Google using their Spam Report. NOTE: If you are not logged into Google's Webmaster Tools they may or may not act on the report by performing a manual review of the site for spam... However, EVERY Spam Report submitted while logged into Google's Webmaster Tools is guaranteed to be acted on typically by manually reviewing the offending URL/site. So if you have a Webmaster Tools login, be sure to log in first. You can get to it by clicking the Report spam in our index link on the right side of the Dashboard page (should take you here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en). If you don't have a Webmaster Tools account you can access it here http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html.
can you provide the link of your competitor? as the way you are explaining it i think it is not favorable to google. than also just provide link for better analysis.
Just provide your and your compititors link without studing i can't give you any advice and may even harm you. So it would be great if you'll give both the links.
The following tips can be useful to you with your Competition: Domain Canonicalization Most people are surprised to find out that http://www.website.com and http://website.com are often regarded as two completely different websites according to search engine spiders. Robots are not all together very good at determining whether or not pages are the same, meaning that these pages may be stored separately from one another rather than the same. You can significantly diminish your potential page rank if you do not consolidate all versions of a page under a single URL. Internal Link Building You should refer back to other content in your website on every content page. Links from your own domain name do still count as backlinks, though they do not count quite as much as one way links from other websites. Avoid using texts like “Click here†or “Next†to link to other pages within your website, use text that targets keywords for a more powerful linking strategy. Create a Sitemap Creating a sitemap for your website is an often overlooked part of SEO. The more pages you add to your website, the more difficult it will be to maneuver, both for search engine spiders and robots, and for human visitors as well. Constructing a sitemap will create an effective way to show everyone where all the content on your website is at quickly and easily. This is an excellent way to make sure that search engine spiders are crawling all of your content, just not the most immediately accessible pages. When you want to beat your competitors and increase your search engine page rank quickly and effectively, it really does not take too much effort but definitely involves smart work and good planning. I could have a better understanding of the competitor and you if you can specify the sites here.
It looks like your competitor is applying some black hat techniques like hidden text etc. But to confirm that we need the url of that site, then only anyone can suggest you about this.
Your competitor is simply using a method which shows text if the browser wont display the flash. Its something every developer should be doing, so yes, he is smarter than you. Look into swfobject and do it on your sites as well...