Application of webometrics methods for analysis and enhancement of academic site structure based on page value criterion

Abstract

This paper describes a formalized procedure for exploring a site using webometrics methods. The procedure involves gathering details on a site’s structure, constructing and exploring the resulting webgraph, defining the correctness criterion, identifying control actions that would improve the structure under the given criterion, testing the correctness criterion on real-world examples and developing recommendations on improving the structure. PageRank is used as a criterion to evaluate the value of web pages. The value is determined by the presence/absence of a link pointing to that page from the homepage of the site. Going by the correctness criterion, valuable pages of a site should have the highest PageRank among all other pages of that site. Control action consists of removing non-valuable directories (and transforming them into independent sites), whose root page has a high PageRank. Experiments are conducted on three faculty sites of major universities in USA, Russia and Nigeria. The approach is shown to be applicable and reasonable in all cases.