An Alternative Data Source for Web Hyperlink Analysis: “Sites Linking In” at Alexa Internet
Liwen Qiu Vaughan · Collnet Journal of Scientometrics and Information Management · 2012
Web hyperlink analysis has been a growing area of research since it started over a decade ago. However, data source for link analysis from commercial search engines has been limited to Yahoo! alone in recent years and even this data source is likely to disappear in the near future. We need to find alternative sources for link analysis. This paper explorers an alternative data source, “Sites Linking In” at Alexa Internet. The paper discussed the nature and the characteristics of this data source and reported a study that compared this inlink data with that from Yahoo! Site Explorer. The study found that the inlink data from Alexa and Yahoo! are highly correlated and that Alexa data can potentially replace Yahoo! data for inlink analysis. Based on these findings, “Sites Linking In” is proposed as an alternative inlink data source if Yahoo! inlink data become unavailable in future.