Since 2004, the Ranking Web is published twice a year (January and July), covering more than 17,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. Web presence measures the activity and visibility of the institutions and it is a good indicator of impact and prestige of universities. Rank summarizes the global performance of the University, provides information for candidate students and scholars, and reflects the commitment to the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

If you need further clarification regarding the motivations of the Ranking or the methodology, please read the FAQ.

Important info

The section Premier League (Files) is the repository of the excel files for the Top 500 that can be used freely citing the source. We are unable to provide larger or previous years files.

The Directory of Universities has been revised and updated, adding more institutions from countries like Russia, India, Indonesia or Malaysia among others. A few entries has been deleted or modified as requested.

The major change introduced into this edition relates to the way the composite index (World Ranking) is computed as we are now combining normalized values instead of ranks. This change affects mainly to the Top universities but we are still providing the individual ranks for each indicator (as in previous editions).

Visibility is now calculated giving extra weight to the academic external inlinks that corresponds to those not coming from .com, .org and .net domains.

A list of individual changes (marked with asterisks) is available at the Notes section.

Comments

The main effect of the changes introduced has been the general improvement of the developing countries institutions. There are still many US universities in the Top 200, but not as many as in previous editions.

Latin American countries benefit from large academic networks (USP in Brazil or UNAM in Mexico). In Eastern Europe, Czech Universities (7 in the Top 20 regional) behave in a similar way. In Africa, Egyptian universities are closing the gap with their South African counterparts but still they are quite behind.

The overall ranking of Asia is influenced by the good performance of Taiwan and Saudi universities (which are excessively focusing on web performance with search engines oriented strategies). Meanwhile, Korean universities are below expected positions (their contents are mostly oriented to students, usually in local language and using duplicate web domains, which is still a common practice in UK too).

New European strong performers are Norway, Spain and Portugal, mostly due to an impressive increase of their Open Access repositories. But France is still suffering of the large fragmentation of their higher education system.

Regarding bad practices

The use of link farms and paid backlinks to improve the rank is not acceptable. The involved institutions will be excluded from future editions. Random checks are made to ensure this policy.

Country Scoreboard

A completely revamped section has been introduced to show a classification of countries according to several indicators such as Web Ranking of Top Universities, population and GDP.

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