Why are Websites Co - linked ?

A random sample Web pages that linked to a pair of Canadian universities was retrieved. The content of the page as well as the context of the link were manually examined to record the following variables: language, country, type of Website, and the reason for co-linking. Résumé : Un échantillon aléatoire de pages web reliées à une paire d’universités canadiennes a été repéré. Le contenu de la page, aussi bien que le contexte du lien ont été manuellement examinés pour enregistrer les variables suivantes : langue, pays, type de site web et raison du colien. 1. Background of the Study Many Webometrics studies have been conducted to examine the nature of Web hyperlinks. Among the various types of Websites, academic Websites are most frequently studied. Several studies have found that the number of hyperlinks (inlinks) to university Websites correlates with the quality of the university using varying definitions of quality. For example, in UK studies, quality is measured by the university’s research performance as shown in UK government’s official research assessment exercise (RAE) ratings (Thelwall, 2001). In the Canadian context, quality is measured by the Maclean’s ranking of Canadian universities (Vaughan & Thelwall, 2005). The reliability of the quality measurement notwithstanding; the studies have shown that, when links are aggregated on a macro level, we can find patterns of linking and uncover useful information. Vaughan (2006) further studied patterns of colinks (If page X and page Y are both linked to by page Z, then X and Y have a co-link) to Canadian university Websites. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to analyze and visualize colink data. MDS mapping results of the data sets accurately reflected the ways Canadians see the universities and clearly showed the linguistic and cultural differences within Canadian society. This shows that colinks are not created at random and that Web co-links can be a measure of the similarity or relatedness of sites being co-linked. While these quantitative studies showed us the patterns of the Web links, qualitative studies are needed to gain a better understanding of the nature of the Web link. Parallel to the quantitative studies, various qualitative studies have been conducted to find out why hyperlinks are created, i.e. the reasons or motivations for creation of a Web link. Most of