English

A Taxonomy of Hyperlink Hiding Techniques

Information Retrieval 2014-04-04 v2

Abstract

Hidden links are designed solely for search engines rather than visitors. To get high search engine rankings, link hiding techniques are usually used for the profitability of black industries, such as illicit game servers, false medical services, illegal gambling, and less attractive high-profit industry, etc. This paper investigates hyperlink hiding techniques on the Web, and gives a detailed taxonomy. We believe the taxonomy can help develop appropriate countermeasures. Study on 5,583,451 Chinese sites' home pages indicate that link hidden techniques are very prevalent on the Web. We also tried to explore the attitude of Google towards link hiding spam by analyzing the PageRank values of relative links. The results show that more should be done to punish the hidden link spam.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1303.2438,
  title  = {A Taxonomy of Hyperlink Hiding Techniques},
  author = {Guang-Gang Geng and Xiu-Tao Yang and Wei Wang and Chi-Jie Meng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.2438},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

12 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T23:39:46.942Z