The impact of website size and volume, rich files, number of articles and website links on the visibility of the top 100 Webometric ranking websites'

Academic websites by introducing history, goals, educational, research, administrative and extracurricular services, and the recruitment of students, faculty and staff, play an important role in the dissemination of educational, research and administrative information of universities. The web is a vast collection of heterogeneous information that are interconnected through links. The information on the web is not organized properly, and this heterogeneous nature of information imposed disordered conditions on the web. However, the organization may provide a large amount of information on its website, but if retrieval of itis difficult, its usefulness will be reduced. Furthermore, a website may have a high level of interaction, but if users can not have access to it, this level of interaction will not be significant. This indicates a key problem in that website’s visibility and accessibility. Visibility is a very important metric in Webometrics studies, so that the usefulness of the inventories depends on how its content is visible, and the numbers in the inventory is a good indicator for measuring visibility. The visibility of a site also affects its coverage and retrieval by search engines. Accordingly, visibility and clarity are related to enabling interconnections in a space that todays have found a great importance. The topic of web visibility and its important role in different rankings of universities and higher education institutions has been the subject of several models in this field.The study examines the impact of website size, the number of rich files, articles and website links on the visibility of the top 100 university websites.

Research was done by descriptive method. The data was gathered using a checklist.

The results showed that 14 features of the industry model were observed in 100% of the websites. The results of the hypothesis test showed that the size and volume of the site (r = 0.637) at the significance level (Sig. 0.002), the number of enriched files (r = 0.546) at the significance level (Sig. 0.001), receiving referral links (r = 0. 674) at the significant level (Sig. 0.000), and the number of articles retrieved from Google Scholar (r = 0.654) at the significance level (Sig. 0.001) has a direct impact on visibility.

As the result adding more rich files, increasing site size and volume, incorporating research outcomes on the site, and establishing more links can increase visibility of the site.