MajesticSEO Analysis of Russell Group University Repositories

Investigation of SEO Rankings of Institutional Repositories

There is a need “to investigate whether links [from popular social media services] are responsible for enhancing SEO rankings of resources hosted in institutional repositories” concluded the paper by myself and Jenny Delasalle which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?“.

The importance of SEO rankings for surfacing content hosted in institutional repositories can be gauged from the responses to the query I asked on the JISC-Repositories JISCMail list: “Does anyone have any statistics on the proportion of traffic which arrives at institutional repositories from Google?”. I asked a similar question on Twitter and found that mature research repositories seem to get about from 50-80% of their traffic from Google. This aligns with the findings reported by Les Carr for the University of Southampton back in 2006: “the majority of repository use, if I can equate eprint downloads with repository use, is due to external web search engines (64%)“. Indeed since it has been reported that direct downloads of PDFs hosted in repositories may not be reported unless Google Analytics has been configured appropriately such figures may be an underestimate!

In light of the importance of Google in supporting repositories in their mission of making research papers easily accessible to others it will be useful to gain a better understanding of the factors which contribute to supporting the discoverability of the content hosted in institutional repositories.

The survey described in this post reports on summary SEO findings for the 24 Russell Group universities. The aims of the survey are to provide a benchmark for comparisons with surveys which may be carried out in the future, to attempt to identify any interesting usage patterns which may help to enhance the effectiveness of institutional repositories and to identify the highest ranked domains which provide links to institutional repositories.

Survey Using MajesticSEO

The data was collected on 27-28 August 2012 using the MajesticSEO service. Note that the current finding can be obtained by following the link in the final column. The findings can be viewed if you have signed up to the free service.

Table 1: MajesticSEO Findings for Repositories Hosted at Russell Group Universities

Ref. No.	Institutional Repository Details	Referring Domains	External Backlinks	Educational Backlinks	Educational Domains	Top Five Domains & Numbers of Links	View Results
1	Institution: University of Birmingham Repository used: eprint Repository	116	499	146	16	blogspot.com: 6,424 wordpress.com: 4,658 wikipedia.com: 200 bbc.co.uk: 82 sourceforge.net: 67	[Link]
2	Institution: University of Bristol Repository used: ROSE	159	691	144	21	wordpress.com: 7,871 blogspot.com: 6,692 wikipedia.org: 273 bbc.co.uk: 98 guardian.co.uk: 89	[Link]
3	Institution: University of Cambridge Repository used: Dspace @ Cambridge	86	7,339	283	97	blogspot.com: 33,276 wordpress.com: 17,241 wikipedia.org: 1,771 google.com: 449 bbc.co.uk: 442	[Link]
4	Institution: Cardiff University Repository used: ORCA	22	58	9	4	wordpress.com: 1,874 blogspot.com: 883 typepad.com: 250 bbc.co.uk: 85 guardian.com: 60	[Link]
5	Institution: University of Durham Repository used: DRO	297	1,281	27	12	wordpress.com: 5,430 blogspot.com: 3,020 wikipedia.org: 145 bbc.co.uk: 76 ask.com: 45	[Link]
6	Institution: University of Edinburgh Repository used: ERA	747	3,943	247	71	blogspot.com: 14,380 wordpress.com: 9,845 wikipedia.org: 470 google.com: 401 bbc.co.uk: 296	[Link]
7	Institution: University of Exeter Repository used: ERIC Note: Repository sub-domain not used. See footnote 2.	198	958	175	18	wordpress.com: 1,125 blogspot.com: 1,115 bbc.co.uk: 45 wikipedia.org: 43 ning.com: 42	[Link]
8	Institution: University of Glasgow Repository used: Enlighten	680	4,868	423	62	blogspot.com: 5,880 wordpress.com: 5,087 wikipedia.org: 322 bbc.co.uk: 178 cnn.com: 135	[Link]
9	Institution: Imperial College Repository used: Spiral	139	702	329	11	wordpress.com: 3,363 blogspot.com: 1,883 bbc.co.uk: 121 guardian.co.uk: 119 wikipedia.org: 65	[Link]
10	Institution: King’s College London Repository used: Department of Computer Science E-Repository	14	37	–	–	blogspot.com: 2,552 wordpress.com: 2,275 bbc.co.uk: 169 wikipedia.org: 160 reddit.com: 139	[Link]
11	Institution: University of Leeds Repository used: White Rose Research Online	700	4,847	1,354	2	blogspot.com: 44 wordpress.com: 23 wikipedia.org: 13 google.com: 8 ox.ac.uk: 5	[Link]
12	Institution: University of Liverpool Repository used: Research Archive	66	297	147	8	blogspot.com: 4,057 wordpress.com: 2,461 wikipedia.org: 97 bbc.co.uk: 55 google.com: 53	[Link]
13	Institution: LSE Repository used: LSE Research Online	1,365	9,771	549	80	wordpress.com: 14,449 blogspot.com: 11,550 wikipedia.org: 343 google.com: 262 flickr.com: 244	[Link]
14	Institution: University of Manchester Repository used: eScholar Note: Repository sub-domain not used. See footnote 3.	(5)	(29)	–	–		[Link]
15	Institution: Newcastle University Repository used: Newcastle Eprints	30	215	85	5	blogspot.com: 6,425 wordpress.com: 3,929 wikipedia.org: 221 bbc.co.uk: 116 ask.com: 87	[Link]
16	Institution: University of Nottingham Repository used: Nottingham Eprints	359	1,594	328	57	blogspot.com: 5,410 wordpress.com: 3,856 wikipedia.org: 148 google.com: 77 guardian.co.uk: 66	[Link]
17	Institution: University of Oxford Repository used: ORA	299	1,116	94	35	blogspot.com: 42,008 wordpress.com: 39,798 wikipedia.org: 1,437 ask.com: 548 bbc.co.uk: 504	[Link]
18	Institution: Queen Mary, University of London Repository used: QMRO	27	449	350	6	wordpress.com: 4,722 blogspot.com: 1,221 orange.fr: 259 wikipedia.org: 219 ask.com: 89	[Link]
19	Institution: Queen’s University Belfast Repository used: Queen’s Papers on Europeanisation & ConWEB Note: Repository sub-domain not used. See footnote 4.	(9)	(14)	–	–		[Link]
20	Institution: University of Sheffield Repository used: DCS Publications Archive Note: Repository sub-domain not used. See footnote 5. Note: The University of Sheffield also uses the White Rose repository which is also used by Leeds and York. See the Leeds entry for the statistics.	(2)	(3)	–	–		[Link]
21	Institution: University of Southampton Repository used: eprints.soton	1,329	46,176	33,524	123	blogspot.com: 4,384 wordpress.com: 2,568 wikipedia.org: 264 bbc.co.uk: 138 microsoft.com: 89	[Link]
22	Institution: University College London Repository used: UCL Discovery	335	13,978	492	24	blogspot.com: 16,009 wordpress.com: 15,633 wikipedia.org: 860 bbc.co.uk: 406 youtube.com: 250	[Link]
23	Institution: University of Warwick Repository used: WRAP	433	2,476	278	20	blogspot.com: 9,412 wordpress.com: 7,601 google.com: 217 wikipedia.org: 179 reddit.com: 122	[Link]
24	Institution: University of York Repository used: YODL Note: Repository sub-domain not used. See footnote 6. Note: The University of Sheffield also uses the White Rose repository which is also used by Leeds and York. See the Leeds entry for the statistics.	(3)	(5)	–	–		[Link]
	Range	14 – 1,369	37 – 46,176	9 – 33,524	2 – 123

NOTE:

1. The list of repositories is taken from OpenDoar.
2. The ERIC repository at the University of Exeter is hosted at https://eric.exeter.ac.uk/repository/ Since the repository home page is a redirect from https://eric.exeter.ac.uk/ it was possible to analyse the SEO rankings and get appropriate results.
3. The eScholar repository at the University of Manchester is hosted at http://www.manchester.ac.uk/escholar/  Figures for this home page are given but since the domains with incoming links may refer to pages hosted on the manchester.ac.uk domain, these figures are not given in order to avoid skewing the findings.
4. The Queen’s University Belfast repository is hosted at http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofPoliticsInternationalStudiesandPhilosophy/Research/PaperSeries/ConWEBPapers/ Figures which are available for this home page are given but since the domains with incoming links may refer to pages hosted on the qub.ac.uk domain, these figures are not given in order to avoid skewing the findings.
5. The DCS repository at the University of Sheffield is hosted at http://www.shef.ac.uk/dcs/research/publications Figures which are available for this home page are given but since the domains with incoming links may refer to pages hosted on the shef.ac.uk domain, these figures are not given in order to avoid skewing the findings.
6. The YODL repository of the University of York is hosted at http://dlib.york.ac.uk/yodl/app/home/index Figures which are available for this home page are given but since the domains with incoming links may refer to pages hosted on the dlib.york.ac.uk domain, these figures are not given in order to avoid skewing the findings.

Table 2 gives the total number of links to the high-ranking domains which are listed in the survey, together with the Alexa ranking for these domains. Note Google.com has the highest Alexa ranking and is listed at number 1. Figure 1 shows the significance of links from blog platforms compared with the other most highly-ranked domains.

Figure 1: Histogram of number of incoming links from top domains

Table 2: Nos. of Links from High-Ranking Domains

No.	Domains	No. of links	Alexa Ranking
1	Blogspot	176,625	5
2	WordPress	153,809	21
3	Wikipedia	7,230	8
4	BBC	2,811	36
5	Google	1,447	1
6	Ask	769	46
7	YouTube	460	3
8	Guardian	334	187
9	Reddit	261	143
10	Orange.fr	259	259
11	Typepad	250	212
12	CNN	135	43
13	Microsoft	89	26
14	Sourceforge	67	139
15	Ning	42	256
16	Oxford University	5	6,764

Discussion

In a previous post I suggested that since LinkedIn.com is so widely used across Russell Group Universities, encouraging researchers to provide links to their papers hosted in their institutional repository would enhance the visibility of papers to Google, especially since LinkedIn has such a high Alexa ranking (it currently is listed at number 13 in the global ranking order).

However it appears that LinkedIn does not appear to have a significant presence according to the findings provided in MajesticSEO (although the free version does only list the top five domains).

Based on the information obtained in the survey it would appear that two blog platforms, WordPress.com and Blogspot.com, are primarily responsible for driving traffic to institutional repositories, having both high Alexa rankings together with large numbers of links to the repositories.

Following these two platforms, but a long way behind, we find Wikipedia and the BBC and then, perhaps somewhat confusingly, Google itself (perhaps links from Google Scholar). The presence of media sites such as the BBC, CNN and the Guardian suggest that researchers (or their media advisers) are doing a good job in ensuring that these organisations provide links to original research papers when stories about university research are being covered in the media.

But perhaps the most noticeable findings is that only one University Web site – Oxford’s – is included in the list of the top 5 domains across all of the Russell Group Universities. The low Alexa ranking (6,764) for the Oxford University Web site in comparison with the other sites listed (which have an Alexa ranking ranging from 1 to 259) suggests that links from university Web sites, even prestigious universities such as Oxford, will not have a significant impact on Google search results. It should also be noted that links from the University of Oxford Web site will not provide SEO benefits to the University of Oxford’s repository, which is hosted in the same domain (ox.ac.uk).

Limitations of this Survey

It should be noted that these conclusions are based on just one SEO tool and only a small selection of the findings are available. A more comprehensive survey would make use of the licensed version of the service, and make use of other SEO tools to compare the findings.

In addition Google do not publish the algorithms on which their search results are ranked so there can be no guarantee that the findings provided by SEO tools will relate directly to users experiences of using Google.

In order to relate these findings to the ways users access resources hosted on a repository there will be a need to examine usage statistics for repositories. It would be interesting to see if the downloads for the most popular items show any correlation with links from the services listed above.

Survey Paradata: The findings given in Table 1 were collected on 27-28 August 2012 using the free version of MajesticSEO. The Alexa rankings listed in Table 2 were obtained from the Alexa survey and collected on 28 August 2012. Where the findings from MajesticSEO were incomplete, due to the repository not being hosted on the root of a repository sub-domain this information was recorded and any data collected was not included in further analysis.

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Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] – [SocialMention] – [WhosTalkin]