Exploring web navigational paths through social network analysis

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to present the network visualization and SNA indicators as a way to explore and to analyse the web site design through the users’ navigational paths. Design/methodology/approach: Web log files from the webometrics.info site were analysed. Web usage mining techniques were used to process these data. Several network graphs (navigational and query graph) were built to inspect the latent structure from the user view. SNA techniques and indicators were used to extract the main results. Findings: Results show networks with small-world and scale-free properties; the double structure of the two language versions; the central position of the search engines as hubs that distribute the access to every page; how the pages are grouped by their thematic and structural relationships; and which pages are less requested through search engines queries or are less visible. Research limitations: Results are based on the web performance of only a web site and its generalization has to be considered with caution. Originality/value: The application of network visualization and SNA indicators allows to explore the web site navigation by users and to test how it is used. The graph representation makes possible an intuitive way to observe the structure of a web site, the behaviour of the users and the information consumption.