  Preferential attachment is the most popular explanation for the emergence of
scaling behavior in the World Wide Web, but this explanation has been
challenged by the global information hypothesis, the existence of linear
preference and the emergence of new big internet companies in the real world.
We notice that most websites have an obvious feature that their pages are
organized as a tree (namely hidden tree) and hence propose a new model that
introduces a hidden tree structure into the Erd\H{o}s-R\'e}yi model by adding a
new rule: when one node connects to another, it should also connect to all
nodes in the path between these two nodes in the hidden tree. The experimental
results show that the degree distribution of the generated graphs would obey
power law distributions and have variable high clustering coefficients and
variable small average lengths of shortest paths. The proposed model provides
an alternative explanation to the emergence of scaling in the World Wide Web
without the above-mentioned difficulties, and also explains the "preferential
attachment" phenomenon.
