  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.
