Title: Exploring hyperlink structure of electronic commerce websites: a Webometric study

Authors: Kannan Rathimala, Govindan Marthandan

Addresses: Faculty of Management, Multimedia University, Jalan Multimedia, 63100, Cyberjaya, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia. ' Faculty of Management, Multimedia University, Jalan Multimedia, 63100, Cyberjaya, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia

Abstract: Hyperlink analysis, an emerging research area in web structure mining, extracts hidden information from hyperlink data. This study analyses the websites of USA|s best 50 small companies to determine the association between the Webometrics data and business performance measures as well as traffic ranking. The results show that there is an association between the Webometrics data and the company|s business information as well as traffic ranking. This suggests that Webometrics data could be used as an indicator for evaluating the business performance of the company as well as the visibility of its website to a target audience.

Keywords: electronic commerce; website structures; hyperlinks; hyperlink analysis; Webometrics; business performance measurement; traffic ranking; search engines; e-commerce; web structure mining; USA; United States; business information; website visibility.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEB.2010.035294

International Journal of Electronic Business, 2010 Vol.8 No.4/5, pp.391 - 404

Published online: 21 Sep 2010 *

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