Webometrics is the largest academic ranking of Higher Education Institutions in the world. Web presence and visibility are used as indicators of global performance and take into account the teaching commitment, the research results, the perceived international prestige, the links with the community, including industrial and economic sectors, of the university.

So what can we do to improve UP’s ranking?

Here are the different indicators and the approach we should follow for each one:

1. Impact: Increase the number of inbound links to the UP domain

2. Presence: Increase the number of pages on the UP website

3. Openness: Increase the number of pdf and rich files

4. Excellence: Increase public visibility of UP’s research output

5. Overall: Communicate improvement options to everyone in your faculty

1.  Impact (weighting 50%)

This indicator relates to the number of inbound links and references to the UP web domain and indirectly measures the exposure the University gets across the globe in terms of reference made to it. The source of the reference, i.e. news media and academic sites, also plays a role in this indicator.

Strategy: Increase the number of inbound links to the UP domain

If your unit, centre, department or faculty has any partnerships or agreements with other universities or any organisations, associations or companies, ask them to place a link to the UP site, or your minisite, on their website. The links don’t have to be directed to the home page of the UP site, it can be to any page on the up domain (.up.ac.za).

2.  Presence (weighting 16,7%)

This indicator relates directly to the web domain, the number of pages and its Google position and rankings.

Strategy: Increase the number of pages on the UP website

Often upload news stories and notices. Also don’t delete old pages, but rather make them inactive so that they are “archived” instead of disappearing. You can even add a heading at the top to say “Archived page” to clear up any confusion if the page is still picked up by Search Engines.

Use keywords in the content on your pages, to make it easy for Google to index your pages and rank them high. For example, include the name of your faculty, department, centre or unit in the text, instead of just in the heading, and use other keywords or keyword phrases that people would typically search for.

Use hyperlinks as an opportunity to emphasise keywords. Rather than saying: "Click here to view our academic programmes" rather say: “View our academic programmes”.                      

3.  Openness (weighting 16,7%)

This indicator relates to the University's performance in Google Scholar and is measured in the number of articles cited there as well as the number of pdfs, documents and other rich text files.

Strategy: Increase the number of pdf and rich files

Make more use of multimedia on your site:

• Create photo galleries of events

• Upload photos and pdf documents with research articles and news stories

• Upload pdf documents or ppt files of presentations done at conferences

• Upload pdf or image files of invitations to seminars and other events

• Make use of sound clips and videos – it is easy to take them with your cell phone

4.  Excellence (weighting 16,7%):

This indicator refers to the academic papers published in high impact international journals.

Strategy: Increase public visibility of UP’s research output

Remind all academics to place all their articles on UP Space, the University’s open source research repository. Write some articles about the research that is being done in your faculty and link to the minisite for the research group as well as to the articles that is located in UPSpace. Also refer to and place links to the articles located in UP Space, on your minisite in the general content.

Very importantly, remind all the researchers to ask for inbound links from other universities and collaborators, and even sponsors.

5.  Overall:

Please communicate these Webometrics tips to everyone in your faculty and encourage them to help improve UP’s ranking. Even if you think you can’t do much, every bit helps.

For further assistance with any of our suggestions above, please log a ticket by sending an email to [email protected]