The study of Webometrics Ranking of World Universities

Technical Report, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Shane Nissom and Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer 27th March, 2012

1. Introduction to Webometrics

The aim of this research is to understand the ranking system, study the visibility of Universiti Malaysia

Sarawak website (www.unimas.my), finding out the key weaknesses that hamper its web performance

and the proposed strategy to improved its Webometrics rank.

Webometrics can be defined as a quantitative study of web related phenomena – the quantitative

aspects of the construction and use of information resources and technologies on Internet. This field of

study emerged based on a realization that the bibliometric analysis of scientific journal citation patterns

can also be applied to the Web (Almind and Ingwersen, 1997). Once such organization dedicated to this

discipline is the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belongs to CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones

Científicas), the largest public research body in Spain. Their research had led them to publish The

Webometrics Ranking of World Universities. It was launched in 2004 and is updated twice (January and

July) every year. Over 12,000 universities worldwide have been considered in this ranking system.

Webometrics Ranking of World Universities is a university ranking system that utilizes both

web presence and the visibility of the web publications as their indicators. The ranking system primary

objective was not to rank institution. The main objective was to promote web publication and support of

Open Access initiatives. This system ranks the universities based on how strong the universities’

presence in the websites by its web domain, repositories and informal scholarly communication. The

system encourages all institutions and scholars to have a web presence in order to reflect their

activities. In order to improve their web performance, the university authority should reconsider their

web policy; i.e. promoting increase of the volume and quality of their electronic publications. Not only

this system focuses on research results, it pays attention to web bad practices (university activities,

quality and research results better reflected in web presence). (Webometrics, 2011)

1.1 Why Web Presence?

First of all, the website is the best showcase for universities. The website covers the universities’

missions: teaching + research + transfer. Top universities are publishing millions of pages produced by

dozens of departments and services, hundreds of research teams and thousands of scholars. These

universities are able to produce so much web publishing due to several factors which clearly correlates

with the global quality of the institution: widespread availability of computer resource, global internet

literacy, policies that promote freedom of speech/teaching and strong competition for international

visibility and open access initiatives.

Web publication promotes scholarly (formal and informal) communication. Websites can reach

larger audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in

developing countries and third parties (economic, industrial, political and cultural) in their own

community.

1.2 The challenge of using web to rank universities

Webometrics Ranking of World University is highly dependent on search engines algorithm. The biggest

challenge of using search engines as a tool to measure institute visibility rank is that we do not know

how the search engine operates. The process of knowing the search algorithm and how websites are

being indexed or crawled is basically a trade secret. The level of web developer’s knowledge also

determines the success of web visibility and presence. A page may not be indexed even though it

contains useful information. Poorly written headers, titles or meta-tag (the keywords), incorrect syntax

and missing tags are the common problems that contribute to this difficulty. Such neglect can seriously

compromise the web rank. There may be some universities out there that use dynamic website – pages

that are generated automatically by web server using variables defined by users such as language,

session IDs, geographical location, search terms and so on (Flint McGlaughlin, Brian Alt, Jimmy Ellis, Cliff

Rainer, 2011). Dynamic websites are not indexed well because of heavy use of scripts. Unscrupulous use

of scripts to create pages can trap crawlers and in turn leads the search engine to conclude that this

page is used for spamming (Sherman, C and G Price, 2001). An institute with larger websites may have

lower visibility rank than its smaller counterpart due to limited time that crawlers can spend on a

particular website. Bigger website means getting smaller visibility and vice versa (Paul Wouters, Colin

Reddy and Isidro Aguillo, 2006).

Another issue worth noted here is the search engine bias. Editorial control is applied in most search

engines (E. Goldman, 2006). The success of ranking algorithm relies on searchers experience. Most

searchers always prefer to click the top few results and because of this, search engines generally tuned

their algorithm to satisfy this experience – the most popular results will always be at top ranking and

least favorite results get less exposure. (Introna L, Nissenbaum H, 2000).

Webometrics ranking system is also biased towards country with higher income. Based on the

observation on the Webometrics ranking table, we can see that the majority of top 50 universities are

from US. Most of these websites received lots of popular links due to their marketing expenditures and

prominence (Elkin-Koren 2001; Pasquale 2006: 25; Upstill et al. 2003). Also, most of these top

universities are originated from country with highest Gross Domestic Product (M.Rajesh and Sindhu.

P.Nair, 2008).

Even though this ranking system adheres to the Berlin Principle (see Webometrics Methodology, 2011),

web indicator is not always the best indicator. Ranking based on digital criteria sometimes provide false

picture of the actual ranking and this ranking should also take consideration such as the market

acceptance of the programmes provided by that institute (M.Rajesh and Sindhu. P.Nair, 2008).

2. The Approach

Web Impact Factor

In the webometrics study, a measure called Web Impact Factor has been used to calculate the impact

factors for websites. This formula was described by Ingwersen (Peter Ingwersen, 1998).WIF can be

defined as the number of web pages in the website received links from other web sites (also known as

the inlinks) divided by the number of web pages published in the site, similar to how impact factors (IF)

for scientific journals are measured by ISI (the Institute of Scientific Information). Cybermetrics Lab uses

the same formula proposed by Ingwersen (1998) to measure the web impact of world universities but

with two new indicators added to the Size component: number of documents in a web domain (Rich

Files) and number of publications in Google Scholar database (Scholar)

Webometrics combines four indicators: visibility, size, rich files and scholars. Visibility is measured by

number of external links from other websites. Size refers to the number of pages, determined by search

engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead. Rich files are the tally of academic activities, all in the

following formats: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf), Adobe PostScript (.ps), Microsoft Word (.doc) and Microsoft

PowerPoint (.ppt). Scholar is the number of citations and papers for each academic domain, tallied by

Google Scholar. Four ranks are combined according to a formula where each one has a different weight

but maintaining the 1:1 ratio between visibility and size. (Webometrics Formula, 2011)

A review of Webometrics Top 200 Universities 2011

A summary of Webometrics Ranking of World Universities 2011 (January and July) will be discussed in

this section. Note: Brackets next to the institute names are the world ranking numbers.

In January 2011, the Top 10 world’s best universities were all US universities, with Massachusetts

Institute of Technology being the world’s best; Harvard University in runner up and Stanford University

as the third best in the world. In Europe, the top three are all British universities; University of

Cambridge (19th) emerged as the best in Europe, followed by University College London (31st) and

University of Southampton (32nd). There were 16 Asian institutions made it to the Top 200. The top

three Asian universities were National Taiwan University (12th), University of Tokyo (16th) and Kyoto

University (24th). The best Latin American universities in the Top 200 were Universidade de São Paulo

(51st), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (66th), Universidade Estadual de Campinas (161st),

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (166th). Six Oceanic universities occupied the Top 200, with

Australian National University (77th) as the best in that region, followed by University of Queensland

(83rd). (Source: Webometrics Jan 2011)

In July 2011, the US universities still dominate the ranking, with all ten US institute occupied the Top 10.

The world’s Top 3 are still MIT (1st), Harvard University (2nd) and Stanford University (3rd). In Europe, the

Top 3 universities are still British institutions. University of Oxford (27th) overtook University College

London (46th) as the second best (previously second best in Europe). University of Cambridge and

University of Southampton positions remain unchanged in Europe’s Top 3 since last ranking edition. In

Asia, the top three universities were still the same institutions in previous ranking. However, their world

ranks significantly dropped - NTU (24th, dropped from 12th), University of Tokyo (34th, dropped from 16th)

and Kyoto University (56th, dropped from 24th). There were 19 Asian universities entered the Top 200,

more than the one in previous edition. In Latin America, there were five universities made it to the Top

200 - Universidade de São Paulo (43rd ), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (49th), Federal do Rio

Grande do Sul (150th), Universidade Estadual de Campinas (158th) and Universidade Federal do Rio de

Janeiro (170th). Finally, in the Oceanic category, Australian National University (71st) was still the best in

Oceania. University of Melbourne (78th) overtook University of Queensland (105th) as the second best in

that continent.

[Source: Webometrics Jul 2011]

UNIMAS as compared to other local universities in Webometrics Ranking of World Universities in 2011

In January 2011, the Top 3 Malaysian universities were (from winner to third placing): Universiti Sains

Malaysia (629th), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (694th) and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (731st).

UNIMAS was ranked 4571st in the world (24th in Malaysia) in that period.

In July 2011 (the most current), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (419th) claimed the number one spot as

the best Malaysian university, overtook Universiti Sains Malaysia (428th). Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

(462nd) still remains as the third best local university. Notice that many local universities have their

webometrics rank far better than in January (see Webometrics Malaysia Rank, July 2011). The Top 3

local universities managed to occupy the World’s Top 500. Meanwhile, UNIMAS climbed the rank to

reach the 3495th spot recently; far better than during January ranking (1076 spots up). UNIMAS is

currently 22nd best local university.

Why UNIMAS is ranked poorly

Based on the ranking in terms of the four indicators (Visibility, Size, Rich Files and Scholar) in the ranking

tables (see Webometrics Jan & Jul 2011), UNIMAS is far behind compared to other top local universities.

By analyzing these figures, we can conclude that UNIMAS has problem with its web visibility and

presence.

Some UNIMAS web pages or content may be deemed invisible (the invisible web). The invisible web

(Sherman, C and G Price, 2001) is the term applied to web pages that cannot be indexed by search

engine spiders. These pages may not be indexed by crawlers because they are created in formats that

many crawlers are not programmed to handle with. These file formats include PDF, Postscript, Flash,

Shockwave and compressed files. Some UNIMAS web pages may be generated dynamically, which also

prevent spiders from crawling them (In the past, dynamic web page have bad reputation for creating

spam, therefore, some web crawlers are not opted to index URLs with script commands).

Another reason to believe why UNIMAS website lacks visibility is because its web design is not search

engine friendly. This website may contain missing tags and broken links, keywords not specified in title

and header tags, URLs that are not crawler-friendly (too much “?”, “&” and “%” in the parameter), page

not compatible with other browsers and so on. Another factor which might lead to this issue is probably

the way how information presented in UNIMAS website. If the web content is misleading, repetitive,

unattractive and not up to date, users will become unmotivated to stay any longer, and worse, they

might not be coming back. And because search engines rank pages based on popularity, a website with

less visits will not get higher rank in the search results and will be given less exposure.

In terms of rich files, UNIMAS doesn’t do well due to lack of content published online. There is no web

archive in UNIMAS website to encourage publication, collection and preservation of university data such

as annual reports, journals, news, interviews and presentations.

The lack of journals available in our website, the attitude of authors and the web policy may explain why

UNIMAS scholarly rank isn’t impressive. UNIMAS institutional repository may contain many research

journals but failed to get indexed by Google Scholar because of lack in training and support in

publications. There is also no support or promote for Open Access in UNIMAS. Webometrics Ranking of

University strongly favors this policy; therefore, universities that allow their materials or repositories to

be accessed and used for free will always get better scholarly rank than universities that wished to sell

their publications. Some authors are not convinced by this move – supporting Open Access means

risking their copyrights and rights to earn money.

Conclusion

A website is no longer a brochure for institution, as it used to be. Today, websites are important as they

become a main platform for describing and communicating the university’s activities. In other words, a

website is a mirror of an institution. Many universities, especially in Taiwan, take the ranking seriously. A

project called “Aim for the Top University Project” was initiated by National Taiwan University (NTU) in

2008. The project’s primary goal was to make this institution a world class university. One of the

proposed strategies in that plan was that the university must consider construction of a content rich and

highly efficient university web site platform (NTU, 2008). And indeed, NTU is the world class university –

ranked 24th in the world; closest was University of Tokyo (ranked 34th in the world). (see Webometrics Jul

2011)

As for UNIMAS, university authorities should take this matter seriously and get involved to improve

UNIMAS web performance so that it matches its academic excellence. In order to achieve that, they

must reconsider their web policy, promote increase of electronic publications and optimize the website.

3. Overview of other university ranking systems and their comparison to Webometrics Ranking of

World Universities

ARWU and QS World University Ranking

There are two known university ranking systems in the world: QS World University Ranking and The

Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). These two ranking system uses different

methodology to rank universities worldwide. QS Ranking covers broad range of university activity:

academic peer review, recruiter review (employers), faculty student ratios, Citations per faculty and

Internationalization. Meanwhile, ARWU took into account alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and

Field Medals, highly cited researchers, number of articles published in the journals Nature and Science,

number of articles indexed in the Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index and per capita

academic performance on an institution. Table 3.1 shows the comparison of ranking methodologies

between Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, ARWU and QS World University Ranking.

Criteria Webometrics QS World University Ranking

ARWU

Universities Analyzed 13000 520+ 3000

Universities Ranked 4000+ 200 (520) 500

Quality of Education

Students/ Staff Ratio

20%

Alumni Nobel &

Field

10%

Internationalization

International Students

5%

International Staff

5%

Size Web Size 25% Size of institution 10%

Research Output

Rich Files 12.5% Nature and Science

20%

(Google Scholar)

12.5% SCI and SSCI 20%

Prestige

(Link) Visibility

50%

Academic Reputation

40% Staff Nobel and Field

20%

Reputation Employers

10% Highly cited researchers

20%

Impact Citations 20%

Table 3.1

Source: Isidro F. Aguillo (2007). Presentation: Webometrics Ranking of World Universities; Webometrics

Formula (2011)

Commentary

Table 3.1 describes the different parameters used by each ranking system to measure university

performance around the world. Unlike QS and ARWU, Webometrics does not calculate the quality of

education and the internationalization factor to measure the university performance. The rank is

determined by the performance of the website (web impact factor) - the size of the website, volume of

electronic publications (rich files such as teaching materials and number of journals indexed by Google

Scholar) and the number of inlinks it has (websites that links to an institutional website). Web rank is

highly related to the global level activities, prestige and overall performance of the university (Isidro F.

Aguillo, 2007). There are two reasons why Webometrics is much better than the two rankings:

QS World University Rankings have been criticized by many for putting too much emphasis on

peer review. It has been known that most staff ranked their own university highly than others.

Also the result is open for manipulation – we do not know who is surveyed and what type of

questions are asked. (Wikipedia, Title: QS World University Ranking).

ARWU favors research intensive universities and the ranking is heavily weighted towards

universities whose alumni and staff have produced more journals and won Nobel Prizes. Only

world class/elite universities (such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford University and University of

Oxford) entered this ranking. Universities that are not research-oriented such as open

universities are not included in this ranking.(Wikipedia, Title: Academic Ranking of World

Universities)

4icu.org University Web Ranking

4 international Colleges and Universities (4icu) is a higher education search engine and directory

reviewing accredited Universities and Colleges in the world. Colleges and Universities are ranked by

4icu.org University Web Ranking. Ranking is based on three unbiased and independent metrics: Google

Page Rank, Yahoo Inbound Links and Alexa Traffic Rank. The aim of this website is to provide a

popularity ranking of world universities and colleges based on the popularity of their websites. 4icu

University Web Ranking is quite related to Webometrics ranking system, only without concern on

volume of publications and number of scholars.

Comparing UNIMAS rank with other local and overseas universities using Webometrics, QS (Asia and

World) and ARWU

University Name

Country Webometrics ARWU 4ICU University Web Rank

QS World University

Ranking

QS Asian University Ranking*

World In Country

Visibility Rank

Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

Malaysia 3495 22 2732 N/A 3666 N/A 191-200

Universiti Malaysia Sabah

Malaysia

1419 9 2219 N/A 3252 N/A N/A

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Malaysia 419 1 418 N/A 280 401-500 76

National Taiwan University

Taiwan 24 1 50 101-150 98 87 21

National Cheng Kung University

Taiwan 67 2 95 201-300 177 285 32

The University of Tokyo

Japan 34 1 46 20 230 25 4

Peking University

China 109 1 85 151-200 13 46 13

Shanghai Jia Tong University

China 167 2 206 201-300 22 124 33

National University of Singapore

Singapore 85 1 117 101-150 23 28 3

University of Oslo

Norway 54 1 63 75 111 108

University of Oxford

United Kingdom

27 2 24 10 12 5

University of Southampton

United Kingdom

44 3 49 151-200 158 75

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

USA 1 1 1 4 1 3

Harvard University

USA 2 2 3 1 7 2

Stanford University

USA 3 3 2 3 4 11

University of California Berkeley

USA 5 5 4 2 8 21

University of Michigan

USA 6 6 7 22 3 14

Table 3.2 (As of October 2011)

Based on Table 3.2, clearly there is no correlation between QS, ARWU and Webometrics rankings for

each university. One institution might rank better in Webometrics than in ARWU or QS because of its

strong e-management. In 4icu University Web Rank, it slightly correlates with Webometrics Visibility

rank (think of 4icu as Webometrics Ranking without the scholar and rich files factor). Meanwhile in

ARWU or QS ranking; universities that have the highest number of researchers and research output are

always the winner.

Why US universities are the best in the world.

It is not surprising that US universities are the best of the best (US universities occupied all Top 10 spots

in 2011). There are many reasons why US universities are world class when it comes to transfer of

knowledge via World Wide Web. US academic institutions were the first to build websites to archive

materials and projects. These universities are committed to Open Access policy. They launched big effort

to populate their repositories, thus increasing the availability of academic papers. Next, marketing

aspects of the web have been well understood in the US (i.e. greater understanding of Search Engine

Optimization).

4. Methodology

The process of analyzing UNIMAS website performance and find out why it has poor web performance

can be described by using the five steps described below:

The first step of our study will be the Overview study of Webometrics will involve the review of the

ranking system – finding out the formula of the ranking and the indicators weighted. Besides reviewing

the ranking methodology, a literature review of Webometrics Ranking Early Warning System journal

done by the Taiwanese researchers (SM Hsieh, SA Lo, CC Hsu and DR Chen) can help us tremendously in

this study. This literature review study will provide us a clear picture of how web data such as page size,

number of documents in pdf or ppt and number of incoming links can be extracted in search engines.

The math behind the calculation of our web ranking (which will be used in the Web Analysis stage) is

directly influenced by this literature review (see Webometrics Ranking - SM Hsieh, SA Lo, CC Hsu and DR

Chen). Table 4.1 describes the definition of the four indicator – all are obtainable from search engines.

Web Ranking Indicators Definition Weight Size (S) Number of pages recovered from three search engines:

Yahoo, Google and Bing 20%

Visibility (V) Total number of incoming links (inlinks) received by a site – measured by Yahoo Site Explorer

50%

Rich Files (RF) Amount of files in Adobe Acrobat (pdf), PostScript (ps), MS Word (doc) and MS PowerPoint (ppt) indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing.

15%

Scholar (Sc) Amount of scholarly documents indexed by Google Scholar

15%

Table 4.1

Once the idea and the concept behind the ranking are well understood, we can start our Web Analysis.

This stage will be divided into three parts: Link Analysis, Web log analysis and Web content analysis.

These analyses will be used to measure, collect, analyze and report web data of UNIMAS. Table 4.1

shows the objectives of each analysis and the methods used to extract these crucial data.

Analysis Objectives Web Tools / Search Engines

used

Which Web Ranking Indicator

are we looking for?

Query to obtain the Web Ranking

indicator

Web log Analysis

Analyze web usage -popularity , number of visits, visitor behavior and terms used in search engines

1. Themecraft.net 2. Alexa Internet

Link Analysis Measure web visibility number of incoming links to www.unimas.my

Yahoo Site Explorer http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Visibility (V)

Web Content Analysis

Locate www.unimas.my placement in search engine results page

1. Yahoo 2. Bing 3. Google

“university in Malaysia” “university di Malaysia” “Sarawak university” “borneo university”

Find the amount of files in PDF, PS, DOC and PPT indexed by Yahoo, Google and Bing. Note: PostScript files (PS) can only be found in Google, therefore, command “site:unimas.my filetype:ps” will return nothing in Yahoo/Bing. Also, find the amount of these file types for each faculty in UNIMAS.

1. Yahoo 2. Bing 3. Google

Rich Files (RF) Whole UNIMAS domain: site:unimas.my filetype:pdf site:unimas.my filetype:ps (in Google ONLY) site:unimas.my filetype:doc site:unimas.my filetype:ppt Faculty-wise search: (Same formula as above but add subdomain (the faculty web) URL first. For example: calm.unimas.my, bpps.unimas.my)

Find the amount of pages indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing.

1. Yahoo 2. Google 3. Bing

Size (S) site:unimas.my

Find amount of journals indexed by Google Scholar

Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com.my/)

Scholar (Sc) site:unimas.my

Calculate the final result – The Web Rank (WR).

Sum up the results obtained from the queries. The formula: WR = [0.2 x Size] + [0.5 x Visibility] + [0.15 x Rich Files] + [0.15 x Scholar]

Table 4.2

Once we obtained the results from Web Analysis, we will run Comparative Study between UNIMAS and

other top local and overseas institutions. We will study 1) the Web features (design impact) and 2) the

Web Analysis (web impact) of different institutions (both local and overseas) - using the same formula in

Table 4.2. Ten top universities were selected for this study - 5 Local, 2 Asian, 1 UK and 2 US. Table 4.3

shows the list of universities which will be used for this comparison.

From the results of our Comparative Study, we can understand why these universities are the best

(based on the Web Rank score). We will explore these websites’ design and identify the key features

which make these universities rank better than the rest. We will list them as Best Practices.

UNIVERSITY NAME COUNTRY URL WEBOMETRICS World Ranking (as of July 2011)

Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) Malaysia www.ums.edu.my 1419

Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) Malaysia www.usm.my 428

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Malaysia www.utm.my 419

Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) Malaysia www.upm.edu.my 589

Multimedia University (MMU) Malaysia www.mmu.edu.my 1131

National Taiwan University (NTU) Taiwan www.ntu.edu.tw 24

University of Tokyo Japan www.u-tokyo.ac.jp 34

University of Oxford UK www.ox.ac.uk 27

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) USA www.mit.edu 1

Harvard University USA www.harvard.edu 2

Table 4.3

5. Findings and Discussions

Web Log Analysis

Data about number of visitors, number of page views, popular pages, visitor behavior and referrals

(terms used in search engine to locate the website) were identified in this analysis. Two analytic tools

were used in this study: Alexa and Themecraft (see Table 5.1 and 5.2).

Table 5.1: UNIMAS Web Log Analysis (Themecraft.net)

UNIMAS website statistics taken from Theme Craft since June 2011:

http://themecraft.net/www/unimas.my). Note: No update so far. Data remains the same as on June

201 – probably updated once a year.

1. Most keywords used to find unimas.my (from highest to lowest)

Sarawak Universiti Malaysia On The Web

2. Keyword Chart

3. Top 10 Most popular pages in unimas.my

1. http://www.unimas.my/ 2. http://dominomail.unimas.my/ 3. http://www.fmhs.unimas.my/ 4. http://www.frst.unimas.my/ 5. http://www.fcsit.unimas.my/index.php?option=com_content 6. http://www.feng.unimas.my/RNG-Computer-and-Communication-

Technology/feed/at... 7. http://www.feng.unimas.my/component/option,com_jevents/Itemid,

0/ 8. http://www.calm.unimas.my/calm_arc/images/stories/borang%20ptk

%20rev.4-2009... 9. http://www.feng.unimas.my/Departments/Dept-of-Electronic-

Engineering/academ... 10. http://www.feb.unimas.my/feb_arc/index.php?option=com_content&

task=section&...

4. HTML Validation Chart

Note: There were fluctuating HTML validation errors on unimas.my over the last year (Minimum 12, maximum 155)

5. Search Engine Optimization Score

WWW.UNIMAS.MY SEO SCORE: 46% Remark: Below average. Webmaster should focus on following search engine guidelines.

6. Link Analysis

www.unimas.my had minimum 8 and maximum 51 external links over the

last year. www.unimas.my had minimum 42 and maximum 80 internal links over the last year.

7. Indexed pages

www.unimas.my had minimum 4488 and maximum 13604 indexed pages (pages that are known by the search engine on the domain, documents on www.unimas.my that can be searched and found) over the last year.

8. Backward links

www.unimas.my had minimum 8,785 and maximum 25,690 links pointed from other sites to www.unimas.my (links that search engines use to calculate importance of www.unimas.my ) over the last year.

9. Google PageRank

7 **

**Warning: PageRank metric does not influence much in ranking of sites by all search engines.

Focus on traffic, conversions and the lifetime value of the visits sent by search engines (The

Science of Ranking Correlations: How does PageRank Perform?)

Table 5.2: Web Log Analysis (Alexa) – June, 20th 2011

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/unimas.my

Statistics Summary about www.unimas.my according to Alexa

“Unimas.my has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 418,534. It can be found in the “Malaysia” category. It is relatively popular among users in the city of Kuching (where it is ranked #340). Approximately 84% of visitors to Unimas.my come from Malaysia, where it has attained a traffic rank of 5,201. Compared with all internet users, the site appeals more to users who browse from school; its audience also tends to consist of childless, highly educated women earning less than $30,000.”

Alexa Traffic Rank 418,534 (Update: 429,952; 27th June 2011) – weekly observation

Traffic Rank in Country 5,201 (Update: 5312; 27th June 2011) – weekly observation

Number of External link 375

Top Queries from Search Traffic

Clickstream

Latest Alexa Update: 18th October 2011

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/unimas.my

Statistics Summary about www.unimas.my according to Alexa

Unimas.my has a three-month global Alexa traffic rank of 230,643. Visitors to the site spend approximately nine minutes per visit to the site and 46 seconds per pageview. Approximately 87% of visitors to it come from Malaysia, where it has attained a traffic rank of 931. Visitors to Unimas.my view an average of 6.9 unique pages per day. Compared with all internet users, the site's audience tends to be users who browse from school; they are also disproportionately childless, highly educated women earning less than $30,000.

Alexa Traffic Rank 230,643

Traffic Rank in Country 931

Number of External link 646

Top Queries from Search Traffic

Clickstream

Link Analysis

Table 5.3 shows us the number of incoming links (inlinks) to UNIMAS website. Yahoo Site Explorer was

used to measure the number of inlinks in www.unimas.my.

Table 5.3: Number of Inlinks in UNIMAS

Number of Inlinks in www.unimas.my using Yahoo Site Explorer

19386

18th October 2011

Web Content Analysis

Four different queries were used to see how well www.unimas.my is ranked on three different search

engines. The search result placement can be defined by looking at the website position in the page

result (Rank) and the page where the URL is found (Page Number). Table 5.4 shows the full results of

these queries.

Table 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7 describes UNIMAS web size, the amount of rich files indexed by Google, Yahoo

and Bing and the amount of scholarly documents indexed by Google Scholar respectively; all are

calculated based on the formula used by SM Hsieh, SA Lo, CC Hsu and DR Chen. For each faculty’s

amount of rich files indexed by search engines mentioned above, please refer to Table 5.11, 5.12 and

5.13. Finally, Table 5.8 shows the Final Results (Web Rank).

Table 5.4: UNIMAS placement in Yahoo, Google and Bing

Yahoo Google Bing

Search Terms Rank Page Number Rank Page Number Rank Page Number

“university in malaysia” 7 1 5 1 8 1

“university di malaysia” 6 7 8 2 7 2

“sarawak university” 1 1 1 1 1 1

“borneo university” 4 2* 1 1 7 1

(1st October 2010) *Link from other website pointing to www.unimas.my; presumably a directory website.

Table 5.5: UNIMAS Web Size

Size (Yahoo, Bing, Google) Yahoo 10446 Bing 8320

Google 53800 Average Size 24188.7

(18th October 2011)

Table 5.6: UNIMAS Rich Files

Search Engines Rich Files

PDF PS DOC PPT

GOOGLE 1570 0 186 1

YAHOO 210 28 0

BING 210 28 0

Average number of files 663.33 0 80.67 0.33

Total = Avg (PDF) + PS + Avg (DOC) + Avg(PPT)

744.33

(18th October 2011)

Table 5.7: UNIMAS Indexed Scholarly documents

Number of indexed documents in Google Scholar

Include citations At least summaries

32 29

Average scholarly documents 30.5 (18th October 2011)

Table 5.8: UNIMAS Web Rank Value

Size (20%)

Visibility (50%)

Rich Files (15%)

Scholar (15%)

Web Rank = [0.2 x Size] + [0.5 x Visibility] + [0.15 x Rich Files] + [0.15 x Scholar]

24188.7 19386 744.33 30.5 14646.97 (18th October 2011)

Comparison Analysis

Table 5.9: Comparison of Web Content Analysis between UNIMAS and Other Universities

University Name Visibility Size Rich Files Scholar Web Rank Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

19,386 24188.7 744.33 30.5 14,646.97

Universiti Malaysia Sabah

19,720 69,301 4,565

1,027 24,559

Universiti Sains Malaysia

44,625 193,844 27,822.33 15,200 67,534.72

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

76,550 320,305 41,071.67

14,500 110,671.68

Universiti Putra Malaysia

68,590 298,201 18,575.33

11,000 98,371.57

Multimedia University

14,693

111,365

4,365.67

488

30,347.48

National Taiwan University

198,286

1,132,551

110,200.67

120,000

360,183.30

University of Tokyo

120,654

1,348,420

115,246.67

23,350

350,800.43

University of Oxford*

451,394 850,613.67 73,356.67 75,750 412,634.73

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

184,449

4,608,491

349,813.33

48,850

1,073,722.13

Harvard University

563,151

4,569,371

105,643.33

1,760,000

1,475,296.27

(21st October 2011 & *24th October 2011)

Table 5.10: Site features comparisons

Name Web language News archive/portal

Statistics (Annual report) on main/faculty

level site

Google custom search

Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

English only No No No

Universiti Malaysia Sabah

English and Malay No Yes (in their ePrints)

Yes

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

English and Malay Yes http://www.news.utm.my/

Yes Yes

Universiti Sains Malaysia

English and Malay Yes * http://www.usm.my/index.php/en/about-usm/news-archive/66-news-highlight.html

Yes No

Universiti Putra Malaysia

English and Malay Yes http://www.upm.edu.my/?kat=1&aktvt=berita&kod=link

Yes Yes

Multimedia University

English only Yes http://pulse.mmu.edu.my/index.php?sectid=1&artsect=2

Yes Yes

National Taiwan University

English and Mandarin Yes http://www.ntu.edu.tw/engv4/highlights/archives.html

Yes No

University of Tokyo

Japanese, English. Korean, Chinese

Yes http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/public/archive_e.html

Yes Yes

University of Oxford

English Yes* http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/index.html

Yes Yes

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

English Yes http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/search.html

Yes Yes

Harvard University

English Yes http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/print-gazette-archives/

Yes Yes

*newer and older news collection share the same list

Continue

Name Social Media Video sharing portal Blog

Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

Facebook Wikipedia

Yes (added recently) No

Universiti Malaysia Sabah

Facebook Wikipedia

No Yes*. http://sifeums.blogspot.com/

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Facebook Wikipedia Twitter YouTube

Yes Yes

Universiti Sains Malaysia

Facebook Wikipedia

Yes Yes http://blog.eng.usm.my/

Universiti Putra Malaysia

Facebook Twitter Wikipedia YouTube

Yes Yes * http://www.idec.upm.edu.my/index.php?option=com_myblog&Itemid=133

Multimedia University

Facebook Twitter Wikipedia

No Yes* http://mmuawesome.blogspot.com/

National Taiwan University

Facebook Wikipedia

No Yes fss.blog.ntu.edu.tw/

University of Tokyo

Facebook Wikipedia Twitter

Yes http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/gen03/movie_e.html

Yes http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/blog/index_en.php

University of Oxford

Facebook Wikipedia Twitter YouTube iTunes U

Yes

Yes http://www.ox.ac.uk/blogs.html

Massachusetts Facebook Yes Yes

Institute of Technology

Wikipedia Twitter YouTube iTunes U

http://diversity.mit.edu/blog/index

Harvard University

Facebook Wikipedia Twitter YouTube iTunes U

Yes Yes

*External blog – made by staff, student or alumni, independent to their institution

Continue

Name Web Accessibility Conformance

Institutional repository

Student friendly level

Open Courseware

Universiti Malaysia Sarawak

No UNIMAS Institutional Repository http://cais-mill.unimas.my/screens/sym.html

Low (some misleading/confusing headers, rarely updated)

No

Universiti Malaysia Sabah

Yes (for blind user) http://www.ums.edu.my/webv3/w3c.php

UMS ePrints http://eprints.ums.edu.my/eprints/

Very low (too wordy, some confusing headers, font size too small, dull background)

No

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Yes http://www.utm.my/corporateaffairs/webteam/accessibility/

UTM ePrints http://eprints.utm.my/

Excellent Yes

Universiti Sains Malaysia

No USM ePrints http://eprints.usm.my/

Low No

Universiti Putra Malaysia

No UPM Institutional Repository http://psasir.upm.edu.my/eprints/

Average No

Multimedia University

No SHDL@MMU Digital Repository http://shdl.mmu.edu.my/

Average No

National Taiwan University

Yes http://www.webguide.nat.gov.tw/Survey/wSite/ct?xItem=1206&ctNode=194&mp=10

NTU Institutional Repository http://ntur.lib.ntu.edu.tw/about/index.jsp

Average Yes

University of Yes UT Repository Good Yes

Tokyo http://www.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/accessibility/index.html

http://repository.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/about_e.html

University of Oxford

Yes http://www.ox.ac.uk/web/rules/accessibility.html

Oxford University Research Archive http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/

OK Yes

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Yes http://web.mit.edu/atic/www/accessibility/guidelines.html

DSpace@MIT http://dspace.mit.edu/

Excellent Yes

Harvard University

Yes http://www.accessibility.harvard.edu/technology_accessibility/guidelines.php

DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) http://dash.harvard.edu/

Excellent (similar standard with MIT)

Yes (Harvard Medical School)

Table 5.11: UNIMAS faculties/departments Rich Files in GOOGLE (12th & 13th October 2011)

Note: Notice that all values in PS, DOCX and PPTX columns in Table 5.12 (Yahoo) and Table 5.13 (Bing) are zero. PostScript (.ps)

and Office Open XML files (such as .pptx and .docx) are not indexable in Yahoo and Bing. Only Google allow these.

Table 5.12: UNIMAS faculties/departments Rich Files in YAHOO (12th & 13th October 2011)

Table 5.13: UNIMAS faculties/departments Rich Files in Bing (12th & 13th October 2011)

Discussion and analysis of result

Based on Table 5.1 (Themecraft), the most used keywords to locate UNIMAS in search engines are

Sarawak, followed by Universiti and Malaysia. We do know that UNIMAS is the acronym made from

these terms; therefore, only direct terms give higher chances of generating visits (see Table 5.4).

However, indirect terms such as “universiti di Malaysia” and “university in Malaysia” make UNIMAS

difficult to rank higher in search results, especially in Yahoo! (see Table 5.4). There were few HTML

errors/warnings traced by Themecraft (see Table 5.1: HTML Validation Chart). This could be the reason

why UNIMAS doesn’t rank well. Search engines penalized websites that fail to deliver 100% correct

HTML documents even though it can still be displayed in web browser. It does make sense that these

webmasters are still lacking in web optimization skill. To counter this problem, Search Engine

Optimization training for these webmasters is highly needed to make our university more exposed in the

Web.

Today, Web Accessibility has become increasingly important and this practice is taken seriously by top

universities such as MIT, University of Oxford and UTM (see Table 5.10: Web Accessibility Conformance).

Web Accessibility allows increase reach to disabled and special needs users. In UK, for example, half of

the population is registered as disabled (sight problem, learning difficulties, hearing impairment and

color blind). This is why making website accessible to everyone is so important, not just for us. Plus,

these users do have spending power too. In UK also, disabled people have a disposable income of £50

billion per year (Design-Ecommerce). Unfortunately, UNIMAS have no conformance to this practice and

this is why we did not gain competitive advantages and add real value to the community.

There is a huge digital divide between UNIMAS and other top local universities (see Table 5.9). Our Rich

Files, Scholarly Output, Web Size and Visibility are way too low compared to these top local universities;

not even closer to our neighboring university, Universiti Malaysia Sabah. This table clearly shows us that

UNIMAS is not yet taking the Web seriously.

We do not have stronger base in social media - some faculties have their own Facebook profile and

some do not; we don’t have blog/twitter/forum page to encourage our students and staff to

communicate and share ideas with each other. Local universities such as UPM, UTM and MMU already

know how to harness the power of social media. These universities have already utilized social

networking sites such as Facebook ,Twitter and Blog to facilitate spread of information among their staff

and students (see Table 5.10: Social Media and Blogs) which in turn generate huge amount of traffic to

their website and increase their web visibility (inlinks). Ironically, the second most visited website (after

Google) that visitors go before/after visiting www.unimas.my is Facebook, followed by YouTube (see

Table 5.2 – Alexa Clickstream) and we overlooked this opportunity.

UNIMAS website has only one language -English. The side effect is bad: it becomes a challenge for

visitors who do not speak or understand English and this would directly cause the website to generate

less traffic since we already counted them out. The need of multilingual website is required to broaden

our site audience by encouraging both English and non-English speaking users to visit our website and

understand the content. (In our case, we may need Bahasa Melayu, Mandarin, Iban or even in Arabic).

Among all problems we can discover from UNIMAS website, there is one that contributes the most –

lack of publications made online (see our low Rich Files score in Table 5.9). There were no archive

sections made in our website to organize and preserve university materials such as news, research

papers and corporate documents. Basically, we made UNIMAS activities deem invisible to outside world

– we did not create global visibility for our own institution scholarly research.

Our Scholarly rank was surprisingly very low (Other local institutions managed to get between 500 and

16,000 journals indexed online and UNIMAS only have 32 journals). When queried with the term

‘site:unimas.my” in Google Scholar, none of them were from our repository (CAIS). All journals indexed

were actually from faculty websites - CALM, FENG, IBEC, IEAS, FMHS and FCSIT websites. No journals

from CAIS were found in the search results. It seems that our Institutional Repository - the centre of our

university intellectual output - have failed to make these digital publications visible in Google Scholar.

As we go further – this time we want to see the ability of each faculty/department within UNIMAS to

publish their works online in their websites (the microsites/subdomains) – the results were not so

impressive. In Table 5.11, the digital gap between faculties/departments is enormous. Faculty of

Engineering uploaded the most files online – 149 files, followed by Faculty of Economics and Business

(102). The lowest was ISITI – zero files. Of all the faculties, nothing comes as surprising as CAIS. As a

digital library that collects and preserves intellectual output of the university, it should normally display

more files than the rest of the faculties. Instead, it has only one file indexed in Google (and it’s not from

Symposia - the current institutional repository!). This result shows that our current repository failed to

allow Google Scholar to index these journals. Just to add to the insult, there was no link to Symposia

after we tried searching using the terms “Symposia UNIMAS” in Google Search. The first page of the

search result was totally unrelated to the institutional repository or even CAIS!

Finally, at Table 5.12, the amount of files retrieved by Yahoo is far smaller than Google (less than 50% of

the amount retrieved by Google). Both Yahoo and Google use different search and this explain why less

files retrieved in Yahoo than Google (How Search Engines Operate). Again, Faculty of Engineering

uploaded the most files online (74 files). There were 11 faculties with zero rich files indexed in Yahoo -

FRST, FSS, CAIS, IHCM, INDI, BPPS, IAD, QAD, ISITI, CLS and CTTC. Bing search have similar results to

Yahoo (See Table 5.13).

Even though it might be considered normal to notice the amount of files indexed in Yahoo or Bing is

lower than Google, the difference ratio does still matters a lot. In UNIMAS, there was a sign of huge

imbalance in amount of rich files retrieved between these search engines. Take a look at PDF files. There

were 1570 pdf files indexed in Google whereas 210 pdf were found in Yahoo and Bing. The difference

was enormous: 7.47 (that’s more than 70% different!!). Top local university such as UTM have better

ratio - For PDF, UTM has 48700 indexed in Google; 27500 in Yahoo and 26900 in Bing. Difference ratio

was very small – Google/Yahoo = 1.77; Google/Bing = 1.81.

It is imperative that we must improve our web pages or rich files presence in both Yahoo and Bing, not

just Google. Webometrics Ranking of World Universities requires quantitative data from these three

search engines to rank universities.

Best Practices

See MS PowerPoint Slides for list of best practices (filename: webometric research June 6 V2.1 (Best

practices).pptx)

Webometrics Ranking Concept Mapping

1. SIZE

2. VISIBILITY

3. RICH FILES

4. SCHOLAR

6. Action Plan

Immediate action

1. Research Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

1. Collect UNIMAS traffic data for research

Use Alexa Internet or ThemeCraft – web rank, inlinks, searches per day/week/month

Shane To be handed over to

webmasters

Shane to produce periodical chart and guideline for future monitoring

2. Study SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – finding better strategies in getting our website more visible and well ranked in search engines.

Look for SEO guides (bookstores or in Internet – for example, www.seomoz.org)

Webmaster/CICTS to be responsible

Summary for presentation of SEO measures (slide) e.g. broken links brings us down

3. Research search queries – common terms used by searchers to locate things which will lead to UNIMAS shown in search engine results page (research, courses, policy, historical background)

Create list of common terms use for searching UNIMAS or its related activities:

Examples: “universities in Malaysia”, “medical courses in Sarawak”, “IT study in east Malaysia”

Try out on each search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing(Live Search)

To train UKK on checking Shane: Check if any improvement?

UKK to monitor changes periodically

4. Benchmark with other top local and overseas in terms of their web ranks and inbound links.

Get web ranks – Alexa, Webometrics and 4icu.org Find Inbound links – Alexa and Yahoo Site Explorer

Shane: Produce comparison chart and help monitor overtime

BPPS/Faculties/

5. List features not present in UNIMAS website

List of examples: News Clip Archived News

Shane to compile list and examples To be presented to

JKMA/TECIS to monitor

Annual report Multilanguage OA repository

Management

Short term strategy

2. Web Optimization for unimas.my Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

1. Sign up for Analytics tools, required for traffic analysis data collection.

Sign up for: Google Analytics Yahoo Web Analytics Google Webmaster Tools Bing Webmaster Center

Webmaster, CICTS

Discuss with Adam to see what we can do

2. Improve HTML structure. 1. Locate HTML error http://validator.w3.org/ . 2. Check for keywords in TITLE and H1 tags for

each page. 3. Optimize URL architecture – clean and well

structured URLs allow search engine spiders to locate pages with ease. For example, URL like www.unimas.my/about/ has better chance to appear at top search engines result than http://www.unimas.my/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Itemid=325 when searching for “About Universiti Malaysia Sarawak”. Plus, majority of search engine users are more inclined to click that URL.

4. Check browser compatibility - http://www.anybrowser.com/

5. Use robots.txt to determine which page to be crawled by web spiders or not – prevent spiders from consuming excessive amounts of bandwidth on web server.

6. Consider use of Nofollow attribute –linking to another page can influence that page’s ranking. Use rel=nofollow when linking to another page

Webmaster/CICTS List problems precisely and present at TECIS

TECIS/CICTS

without influencing that page rank. Reference: www.seomoz.org

3. Consider adding new features and increase contents in www.unimas.my

1. Add Multilanguage feature in UNIMAS website to attract local and international visitors

2. Put university news at first page, bigger and clearer – telling visitors about the recent events and ground breaking discoveries.

3. Add more story/introduction about UNIMAS – history timeline, statistic reports (annual report), achievement and so on.

4. Add printable document Guide book Annual report Newsletters

5. Add more visibility on Morpheus – make e-learning more accessible, no login required.

6. Add Testimonial section – reports on Alumni success stories.

7. Create archive for: Present and past news Annual reports Research journals Newsletters

Shane: Best Practices and Examples of what we are doing

PTJ/CAIS/UKK/CALM/ CLS for Translation

4. Follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) – allow web accessibility for people with disabilities

The following are examples of tools that can be used to assist us in checking how accessible are we:

Achecker http://achecker.ca/checker/index.php

A-Prompt Web Accessibility Verifier http://www.aprompt.ca/index.html

WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool http://wave.webaim.org/

More tools at:

Web-Master TECIS/CICTS

http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/selectingtools.html

3. Go Open Access Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

1. Make our publications visible in Google Scholar

1. Gather Data from CAIS Institutional Repository SCOPUS and ISI – number of researcher IDs.

2. Schedule Institutional Repository release of outputs

3. Training on Academic Publication (Profiling) – SCOPUS + short courses.

4. Upload articles in our website 5. Create our own open access repositories

using latest version of EPrints software and host our papers there – USM does this.

6. List our publications at Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) http://scholar.google.com.my/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html www.doaj.org http://www.eprints.org/

PTJ to Enforce RIMC/CAIS to provide data

JKMA/TECIS/QAD

2. Promote increase of volume and quality of publications in institutional resource database.

1. Get all staff to put their abstracts online. 2. Convert journals that are not in electronic

format into HTML or PDF – scan articles and upload into website.

3. Gather data from CAIS

PTJ to Enforce CAIS to provide

support

JKMA/RIMC

3. Encourage and support all of our scholars, researchers and graduate students as

Give training on how to publish their abstracts – document type (.pdf), content to add so that it can be indexed by Google

PTJ to Enforce RIMC/CAIS to

provide support

JKMA

potential authors. Scholar.

4. Offsite: Get more Web Traffic to UNIMAS website Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

1. Put in more information about UNIMAS in Wikipedia – make the content look more interesting which will influence visitors to visit our website directly from there.

1. Follow USM example in Wikipedia; they add everything from historical background to events occurred (campus walk, movies filmed in or near USM, basically anything associated with them)

PTJ to Enforce UKK to provide support

JKMA/QAD

2. Utilize more Social Media to generate more traffic

1. Create workshop about social networking – Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn

2. Create UNIMAS Facebook to promote itself and research

3. Create Facebook/LinkedIn for each faculty in UNIMAS – promote communication and info sharing between students, staff and alumni.

4. Promote use of Twitter – student/staff talks and create followers.

5. Create UNIMAS Flickr - promote via sharing photos.

6. Showcase the best UNIMAS projects in YouTube.

7. Video making competition – add videos in YouTube.

8. Encourage students/staff to blog (Blogger, WordPress, BlogSpot, etc) – create a topic, post comments and add link to UNIMAS.

9. Propose blogging competition –

PTJ to Enforce UKK to provide support Blog moderator (ensure blogs are moderated and legal before being posted for public view)

CAIS/JKMA/UKK/QAD

topics: UNIMAS: International U Persada Antarabangsa di Bumi Kenyalang, Research University in Sarawak and UNIMAS as a choice for undergrads and post grads.

10. Encourage students/staff to create ezine articles related to UNIMAS – create a topic to discuss then add link back to UNIMAS (www.ezinearticles.com)

11. Community Service Project

3. Advertise in Google to attract visitors searching in Google and its advertising network

Get Google AdWords – LimKokWing University does this

UKK/ Unit Promosi Cancelori

4. Link with PUSTAKA Get PUSTAKA to link their website to ours – networking plan needed

5. Add UNIMAS to major search engine’s local listings – majority of web traffic comes from local searches.

Get into Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Google Local http://listings.local.yahoo.com/ http://www.bing.com/local/ www.google.com/placesforbusiness

UKK/ Unit Promosi Cancelori

6. Create sitemaps Send to Google Webmaster Central and Bing Search Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster/PTJ TECIS

5. Others Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

More press release Press release in Multilanguage – Iban, Chinese, Malay Coverage in West Malaysia media

CLS/UKK/PTJ

Long term strategy

1. Continue link Building Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

Create more blogs/write articles Find new topics to blog with – events, happenings, research, etc

PTJ to Enforce JKMA

Find more sites to link with 1. Find out who links with other top local/overseas universities and list them by using Yahoo Site Explorer, Alexa and Google (type “link:<university URL>”, i.e. “link:www.unimas.my”)

2. Look for domains with .edu or .gov extension – these educational and governmental establishments are much less likely to link to low-quality pages than typical .com/.net domain

PTJ to Enforce

Search for new web directories that UNIMAS have not populate yet.

Try JoeAnt (human edited directory, similar to DMOZ) - http://joeant.com/

WebMaster/PTJ JKMA

Contribute more publishing in website and journal directories.

See “Go Open Access” section above

2. Track Progress Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

Track location of UNIMAS website in the three search engine results – Bing (MSN Search), Yahoo and Google.

Get screenshots from Bing, Yahoo and Google and archive them.

Shane to produce initial report

Monthly check by UKK

3. Track Ranking Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

Track web ranking Create spreadsheet of UNIMAS weekly ranking in Alexa and ThemeCraft

Shane to produce initial report

Weekly check by WebMaster

4. Update website frequently Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

Keep content fresh. Search engines reward fresh sites – fresh sites stay on top while unchanged/outdated websites get penalized (drop rank)

Add blog section where authors (for example, researchers) can start a new topic, talk and readers can comment there.

PTJ to enforce Weekly check by PTJ RIMC to monitor

5. Monitor website Recommendation Action Taken By Monitor

Check for downed site, performance degrading, incoming link change, content changes and security vulnerabilities.

Download/purchase monitoring tools. Tools: www.alertra.com www.cyberspider.com/cslnkts1.html www.site24x7.com http://linktiger.com

PTJ to enforce Constant check by WebMaster/CICTS

7. Progression Chart

7.1 Web Traffic (Alexa) – Global and Local Web Rank for www.unimas.my

27th June 29th August (The poor season)

380000

400000

420000

440000

460000

480000

500000

520000

Alexa Global Rank

Global

0

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

Alexa Local Rank

Local

18th Oct 14th Nov (Web Ranking began to improve)

7.2 Web positioning in Google, Yahoo and Bing from October to November 2011

7.2.1: Page Number (The page number of search results page where UNIMAS website is placed)

Google

Yahoo

*Note: Page Number 0 means UNIMAS did not appear in the search results.

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

October November

Pag

e N

um

ber

UNIMAS Monthly Google Page Results

university in malaysia

universiti di malaysia

sarawak university

borneo university

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

October November

Pag

e N

um

ber

UNIMAS Monthly Yahoo! Page Results

university in malaysia

universiti di malaysia

sarawak university

borneo university

Bing

Overall Data Table

PAGE NUMBER

GOOGLE YAHOO BING

Terms October November October November October November

university in malaysia 1 1 1 8 1 1

universiti di malaysia 2 6 7 No display 2 2

sarawak university 1 1 1 1 1 1

borneo university 1 1 2 1 1 4

7.2.2: Result Rank (the position number/rank of UNIMAS website in that search results page)

Google

0

1

2

3

4

October November

Pag

e N

um

ber

UNIMAS Monthly Bing Page Results

university in malaysia

universiti di malaysia

sarawak university

borneo university

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

October November

Po

siti

on

nu

mb

er

UNIMAS Monthly Position in Google

university in malaysia

universiti di malaysia

sarawak university

borneo university

Yahoo

*Note: Position Number 0 means UNIMAS did not appear in the search results.

Bing

Overall Data Table

POSITION NUMBER

GOOGLE YAHOO BING

Terms October November October November October November

university in malaysia 5 6 7 7 8 9

universiti di malaysia 8 3 6 No display 7 6

sarawak university 1 1 1 1 1 1

borneo university 1 3 4 3 7 3

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

October November

Po

siti

on

nu

mb

er

UNIMAS Monthly Position in Yahoo!

university in malaysia

universiti di malaysia

sarawak university

borneo university

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

October November

Po

siti

on

nu

mb

er

UNIMAS Monthly Position in Bing

university in malaysia

universiti di malaysia

sarawak university

borneo university

7.3 Web Size: Number of web page retrieved by Google, Yahoo! And Bing

Google

Yahoo

Bing

7.4 Visibility: Number of www.unimas.my incoming links (inlinks)

7.5 Rich Files: Number of PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files retrieved from Google, Yahoo! And Bing

Google

Yahoo

Bing

7.5 Rich Files: Number of DOC (Word Document) files retrieved from Google, Yahoo! And Bing

Google

Yahoo

Bing

7.6 Scholar: Number of research papers indexed by Google Scholar

IMPORTANT NOTE: Progress chart for PS (PostScript) and PPT (PowerPoint) files are unavailable due to

lack of data. There are no PS files uploaded and also number of PPT files is always between zeros and one

8. Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of the Research Committee of UNIMAS for grant us the Short-Term

Grant Scheme funds to carry out this study and also to the committee members of the Taskforce on Webometrics

that comprised of:

Professor Dr. Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer Professor Dr. Hong Kian Sam Associate Professor Dr. Alvin Yeo Wee Associate Professor Dr. Chen Chwen Jen Professor Dr. Ernest Cyril De Run Associate Professor Dr. Dr. Shahren b Ahmad Zaidi Adruce Pn. Korina Bt Ibrahim En. Alhadi b. Bujang En. Azuan b Ahmad Arabi En. Shane Nissom