The U’s worldwide Internet presence ranking went up two places this year.
The U ranked 48th out of more than 5,000 universities included in the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities. Universities are ranked based on several factors including the number of pages on a school’s website and how many scholarly publications are collected on the Google Scholar database.
“The university has done so many great things and works so hard to get news out. News like Mario Capecchi helps drive traffic to our site,” said Jill Brinton, manager of the campus webmaster office.
Universities throughout the world are ranked based on their Internet websites by a research group in Spain called Cybermetrics Lab. The lab began ranking universities for their web-content in 1994. Cybermetrics initiated the web-ranking to promote web publications and inspire university researchers to make their work available on the Internet to researchers worldwide.
Stephen Hess, the U’s chief information officer, attributes the U’s web-ranking increase to work done by the webmaster office and the number of publications released by U researchers.
“We have a very robust web presence — our websites are usually very current for people to get fresh information from,” he said.
The U ranked 43rd among schools in the United States and Canada, also up two places from last year. Cybermetrics Lab bases the university ranking system on four areas. The main indicator of a university’s rank is visibility and how many external in-links, or links coming from other sites, a website has. The other 50 percent of the ranking is based on the number of web pages a site has, the number of files in the site and the number of scholarly articles collected by search engines such as Google and Yahoo.
“We work very hard as a team to make our web presence so easy to view and up to date,” Hess said.
He said the U’s reputation as a top research university helps to bolster the ranking. The U is ranked as one of the top 35 public research universities in the United States by the Lombardi Program on Measuring University Performance.
“I think it’s a combination between research at the U and how the websites are presented,” Hess said.
For more information about the Cybermetrics Lab ranking for universities, visit www.webometrics.info.