Cloaking - the unethical uses
Not all cloaking is bad despite the oft heard cries that cloaking will get you banned but if you use cloaking in an attempt to deceive the search engines you can expect trouble.
Cloaking is often used as an acronym for using scripts or programs to show one page to search engines and quite another to viewers. Since search engines want their rankings to be based on the page which the viewer sees, this tends to distort the relevancy of the page to the rankings it receives. Search engines frown on all attempts to deceive them and will most likely remove your site from their index if they find you using cloaking to deceive them.
Cloaking - The ethical uses
Like most tools cloaking can be used ethically and usefully and in most cases search engines have no problem with such uses, and in fact often use cloaking and redirects them selves. If you use a script to detect what browser your viewer is using and based on that show a slightly different page to viewers using that browser, this should not be a problem and likewise detecting the location or language of a user and redirecting to pages created for that location or language is an ethical scheme which is used to improve the user experience.
I realize that there will be many who will disagree with my suggestions here that there are any ethical uses for cloaking, but you will find on examination that search engines themselves employ cloaking to redirect users to various national and language sites in order to improve the user experience.
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