waht is cloaking

[neteater]

can nay one tell me what is cloaking and whay its assocaited with black hat i googled but cant find a proper info about these two(may be i'd not searched well)
thanks in advance

[akkudreamz]

I found this
http://www.excessvoice.com/seo-article11.htm

and there is some info at the webmaster forum too

[frankfriend]

Cloaking is usually the technique of presenting one set of content to a search engine, and a different set to the readers of a site. It is regarded as a deception, and likely to be reason for a search engine dropping a site.

[Smith6612]

Reminds me of Experts-Exchange.com in a way and how they like to prevent you from getting answers unless you go ALL THE WAY to the bottom of the page as well as block cookies from their site (which my router currently does here, compliments for anyone who uses my connection :P). Quite honestly I hate sites that do that. Don't want people to look at your site and see your content? Don't bother making a search engine see it.