ANU Ranked Oceania's Top University on the Web

The Spanish National Research Council puts out an annual "Web Ranking Universities". The July 2012 edition has the Australian National University as the top ranking university in Oceania. The rankings are based on measures of the depth and quality of the university's web presence. In general universities are ranked by web presence in much the same order as other measures of university quality. The web ranking has ANU, University of Queensland and Melbourne University, as the top tree in Australia. Other rankings have the three, but in different orders.

While ranking top in Australia overall, the ANU only ranked first on one of the four measures which make up the web ranking:

• Openness (15%): First, as measured by the number of "rich" files provided.
  
• Impact (50%): Second by the number of links from external web pages
• Presence (20%): Third for the number of web pages,
• Excellence (15%): Sixth for the quality of research publications.

One obvious area for improvement is in excellence. The compliers of the web ranking use data from Scimago group, which may not correctly reflect ANU's status, as measured by other rating systems.

Openness might also be improved by checking that document files end in pdf, doc, docx or ppt. There may be under-reporting where other file formats are used, such as Postscript (.ps).

Presence may be effected where web pages for the institution are hosted under a different domain name which the ranking system does not count, such as institutes.