Web impact excluding link farms and other black SEO practices
The second 2013 edition of the *Ranking Web (Webometrics) of Universities*, including more than 21000 higher education Institutions has been published: *http://www.webometrics.info/* The rank is based on a composite indicator that combines webometric and bibliometric variables, the first ones collected from the Web during the last July while the second one is the updated Excellence indicator (the 10% most cited papers in 21 disciplines) for the years 2007-2011 (SIR). Major innovation is a new method for calculating web visibility or impact, the most important variable (50%) for the composite indicator used for building the Ranking. The former method consists of combining the number of domains originating the inlinks to the university webdomain (backdomains) and the square root of the total number of those inlinks: sqr(backlinks). In this way it was possible to grant proper recognition not only to most popular web contents or most prestigious institutions but also to the diversity and strength of the impact sources. Unfortunately a few webmasters choose the easy way to obtain additional link visibility contracting external services of link farms or creating their own ones by forcing scholars and students to overlink to the university webdomain from external blogs or similar social tools. In the current edition the top 10, an arbitrary number that is open to future modifications, sources (domains) of links and all the involved links are excluded from the impact indicator. For most of the universities this action exclude student blogs, sports teams pages, non-academic forums, alternative domains and mostly local sources of links, so true global impact is left as main component. Obviously bad practices are strongly penalized with the new system. In a few cases hacked websites due to poor management of the webmasters are being overlinked for more than ten domains, including nasty sources like pornographic, fake-products selling or hate pages. We are identifying these individual cases for exclusion. On the positive side, we expect this change will promote internationalization of the contents. Webometrics is not only ranking websites but the overall performance of the universities. In that sense, it has a clear advantage on other similar rankings where results are obtained only after long-term efforts. A strong and well directed web policy involving not only ICT departments but everybody else in the university is going to have a huge impact in the Ranking. Current leaders by region are: *North America*: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley *Latin America*: Sao Paulo, UNAM, Campinas, Buenos Aires *Europe:* Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, ETH Zurich *Eastern & Central Europe:* Lomonosov Moscow State University *Asia:* National Singapore, Tsinghua, Tokyo, National Taiwan *Africa: *Kwazulu Natal, Cape Town, Stellenbosch *Oceania:* Australian National University, Monash, Melbourne, UNSW *Middle East:* Tel Aviv *Arab World:* King Saud *South Asia:* IIT Bombay -- ****************************** Isidro F. Aguillo, HonDr. The Cybermetrics Lab, IPP-CSIC Grupo Scimago Madrid. SPAIN isidro.aguillo@csic.es ORCID: 0000-0001-8927-4873 ResearcherID: A-7280-2008 Scholar Citations: SaCSbeoAAAAJ Twitter: @isidroaguillo Rankings Web: webometrics.info ******************************
participants (1)
-
Isidro F. Aguillo