Aggregation of the web performance of internal university units as a method of quantitative analysis of a university system: the case of Spain

2013

The aggregation of web performance data (page count and visibility) of internal university units could constitute a more precise indicator than the overall web performance of the universities and, therefore, be of use in the design of university web rankings. In order to test this hypothesis, a longitudinal analysis of the internal units of the Spanish university system was conducted over the course of 2010. For the 13,800 URLs identified, page count and visibility were calculated using the Yahoo! API. The internal values obtained were aggregated by university and compared with the values obtained from the analysis of the universities' general URLs. The results indicate that, although the c…