I see that Google have added to their Quality Guidelines, including a new, helpful(?) definition of cloaking:

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
• Serving different content to search engines than to users.

That’s fairly clear then.

My own definition of cloaking is

My rule of thumb is that you should not need to know that a search engine is making the request in order to deliver a response to that request. The obvious exception to this rule of thumb is Paid Inclusion. Paid Inclusion isn’t cloaking.

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