A Taxonomy of Hyperlink Hiding Techniques
This addresses the problem of search engine spam for web security and search quality, but it is incremental as it provides a taxonomy rather than a new solution.
The paper investigated hyperlink hiding techniques used to manipulate search engine rankings, finding that these techniques are prevalent across 5,583,451 Chinese websites, and suggested that more action is needed to penalize such spam based on PageRank analysis.
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.