Link doping refers to the practice and effects of embedding a large number of gratuitous hyperlinks on a website in exchange for return links. Mainly used when describing weblogs (or blogs), link doping usually implies that a person hyperlinks to sites he or she has never visited in return for a place on the website’s blogroll for the sole purpose of inflating the apparent popularity of his or her website. Since the PageRank algorithms of many web directories and search engines rely on the number of hyperlinks to a website to determine its importance or influence, link doping can result in a high placement or ranking for the offending website (see also Google bomb or Google wash).

Originally used in an essay published in Sobriquet Magazine and on Blogcritics.org, link doping has been confused with the related practice of excessive hyperlinking, also known as “link whoring”. While the two phrases may be used interchangeably to describe gratuitous linking, link doping carries the additional connotation of deliberately striving to attain a certain level of success for one’s website without having earned it through hard work (as an average athlete on steroids might perform better than a naturally gifted athlete not on performance-enhancing drugs).