Influence of language and file type on the web visibility of top European universities

The purpose of this paper is to detect whether both file type (a set of rich and web files) and language (English, Spanish, German, French and Italian) influence the web visibility of European universities.

A webometrics analysis of the top 200 European universities (as ranked in the Ranking web of World Universities) was carried out by a manual query for each official URL identified by using the Google search engine (April 2012). A correlation analysis between visibility and file format page count is offered according to language. Finally, a prediction of visibility is shown by using the SMOreg function.

The results indicate that Spanish and English are the languages that correlate most highly with web visibility. This correlation becomes greater – though moderate – when considering only PDF files.

The results are limited due to the low correlation between overall page count and visibility. The lack of an accurate search engine that would assist in link counting procedures makes this process difficult.

An observed increase in correlation – although moderate – while analysing PDF files (in English and Spanish) is considered to be meaningful. This may indirectly confirm that specific file formats and languages generate different web visibility behaviour on European university web sites.