Criteria of inclusion / exclusion

        Our inclusion policy is very open, as any good faith higher education institution with independent web presence can be included in the ranking. The only requirement is that the university has its own webdomain or subdomain (exceptions being the Universities of Helsinki and Oulu). We reserve the right to exclude fake universities, "diploma-mills" and other non-accredited institutions. Distance learning based universities are specially marked. We do not request nor accept data provided by the universities themselves. Inclusion is completely free of charge.

        Important info about our policy regarding multiple webdomains: If one institution has more than one main domain, we analyze all of them but only the best ranked is published, even if this domain is not the new (current) one or the preferred one. As general rule, we never combine values of several domains. We strongly advice against multiple domains, not only because penalizes the rank, but as it decreases significantly the web visibility of the university and it is very confusing for external users.

        There are three main motivations for exclusion, related to cheating attempts, other unethical behavior or illegal practices:

• Organizations hosting forums or related websites promoting (directly mentioning or through advertisements or by linking) of porn, online gambling, steroids, hate groups, products that help people pass drug tests, sites that promote academic plagiarism or cheating, counterfeit products, data entry affiliates, dialers, drugs, drug paraphernalia, e-gold, products made from endangered species, escort services, fake documents, hacking, miracle cures, prostitution, phishing scams or similar services, products or activities.
• The new legislation prohibits us from linking websites that have deposits of large amounts of copyright-infringed documents (including papers authored by scholars not belonging to the hosting university).
• Also it will be excluded those websites receiving a huge number of paid-links from non-academic sources, including bogus .edu domains.

        Please check the Notes section for explanation about the numbers in brackets.