#1 University Web Site: MIT

A university’s Web page is an institution’s new front door since many prospective students virtually visit colleges these days and alumni are scattered worldwide. Good thing MIT is on top of that. In fact, MIT’s Web site has just been named the top university Web site by 4 International Colleges and Universities, which bills itself as an online directory of accredited, four-year institutions around the world.

A New York Times article wrote: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was deemed No. 1 in Web popularity, followed by Stanford University, Harvard, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Inquiring minds at MIT wanted to know just what was the criteria? 4ICU’s response: “The algorythm is based on three web metrics. Page rank of the home page (i.e. www.mit), Alexa Traffic Rank of the entire site, and number of inbound links (Yahoo!) pointing to the entire site pages.”

In fact, OpenCourseWare Executive Director Cecilia d’Oliveira says MIT has been ranked #1 for several years by a Spanish research group’s Webometrics Ranking of World Universities. That ranking is based on global performance and visibility of the universities with points given for criteria ranging from Nobel prizes to highly cited researchers to size of the site.  The MIT Web site has well over one million pages!