Notes (0,1,3,4)

The following Notes apply when one or several numbers in parenthesis appear before the name of an institution.

(0) Universities with an excess of external backlinks

  • There are several candidate reasons for attracting unexpectedly large number of external backlinks. Perhaps your website has been compromised and it has been hacked with illegal contents. It can be a forum software, a malicious JavaScript o mirror pages published without consent. Another reason is the Black-hat SEO, buying links in order to improve your rank. Backlinks are no longer used in our ranking and their impact is limited, but that is a clear UNETHICAL PRACTICE.
  • We suggest to check the origins and targets of those links and take cleaning actions. Until then the VISIBILITY/IMPACT indicator is set to zero (0)

(1) Universities with two or more central webdomains:

  • This is a BAD PRACTICE that does not only penalize the rank of the universities, but it also significantly decreases their visibility in search engines and, far more important, their global internet impact.
  • We suggest that if a university is going to change its webdomain then the older one should be immediately and completely discarded.
  • IMPORTANT INFO: For the benefit of the institution, our policy is to rank all the domains but to publish only the best ranked domain, even if the selected one is the older or the no longer main webdomain. Any alternative domain should be discontinued AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (no redir, please)

(3) Sub-units with independent web domain

  • BAD PRACTICE: Surprisingly, there are faculties, schools or even departments that maintain a web domain totally different to the university central one. This is a problem linked to the governance of the university but it is also provoking a relevant decrease of the web visibility for both the satellite and the whole university.
  • Same applies to the campuses with their own webdomain as there is no reason for not sharing the central webdomain even if they are in a different locality.

(4) Special situations

  • Universities that are providing only (online) distance learning. It also includes the Caribbean-based Schools of Medicine. Please, check carefully accreditation status of these institutions.
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