An analysis of significance of Revised Web Impact Factor for ranking the websites of state universities in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The level of connectivity and accessibility of a university website and the amount of information it shares have become a competitive factor among the world universities. Nowadays, the World Wide Web considerably contributes in the presence of information of university websites. Due to the immense distribution of information over the World Wide Web, it has been a challenging task to measure the quality and the quantity of the information each university website shares. Therefore, measuring the web impact has become the most popular mechanism among the researchers. This study is to compare the significance of web impact of the state university websites in Sri Lanka based on the link analysis statistics obtained from well-known search engines, Google and Yahoo!. In this analysis the Revised Web Impact Factor, the ratio between the number of inlinks (external back links) and the number of web pages published in the website which are indexed by the search engines (not all pages of the website),was taken into account. The correlation coefficient between the rank of resultant Revised Web Impact Factors and Impact Factors taken from the Webometrics website derived by Cybermetrics Lab was calculated with the ninety percent of inference level. If an academic website increases its link density via Yahoo! Search engine, it is relatively significance for its Webometrics impact factor whereas Google indexing expresses less relevance for the Webometrics impact factor.