Google/Search and Wikiversity/2009

This is a report on some of the results found in the Sep. 1, 2009 data download with commentary. See the summary at Google/Search and Wikiversity for context.

Results from Google Webmaster Tools

Which pages at Wikiversity are most linked to?

**Links to en.wikiversity.org**
*(Downloaded Sep. 3, 2009)*
Page	Links
Southeast Asian Languages/Philippine Languages/Lesson:Introducing Yourself	1,214
Why is Media Literacy Important	970
Help:Contents	881
http://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AllPages&namespace=12	731
Southeast Asian Languages/Philippine Languages	685
Albanian Territories of Balkans (deleted as copyright violation)	553
Introduction to Filipino	489
Introduction to Russian	414
Pronunciation (was moved to Korean Pronunciation, and is now a disambiguation page)	367
Church of Scientology	357

As can be seen from the table at right, languages appear to be a popular topic to link to at Wikiversity. Where are all these links coming from? The "Philippine Languages" pages have a large number of links from wikiwix.com For example, visit this link and look for the Wikiversity sidebar which appears on every page of this site. The inclusion of this sidebar skews the search results returned by Google. The results for "Russian" are also due to wikiwix.com and so we can conclude that these results are not a significant indication that a variety of sites link to those pages on Wikiversity.

Another example is "Church of Scientology" which is likely due to w:Template:Scientology which is used on a large number of pages at Wikipedia. The template includes a link to Church of Scientology here. Wikipedia is ranked very high in Google search results, and so a large number of links from Wikipedia to a page on Wikiversity will increase the Google ranking of a particular page here. It is also likely that we will get a large number of page views from people who clicked on the Wikipedia template. The large number of links does not indicate that our page on the subject is popular, but it does tell use that it is a high visibility page that we should be aware of.

The "Help:Contents" and "Special:AllPages" results are due to a heavily used template at zh.wikipedia.org which can be seen at the bottom of this page.

Most of the results in the "top 10" can be explained by similar heavy linking through the use of templates which appear on many pages of another site. The results in this table are not very useful for the goal of developing Wikiversity. There are exceptions, however. Our Moodle page is linked from a number of sites such as:

But, one direct result from this data is that I recreated the deleted Pronunciation page as a "disambiguation page" to prevent external links to our site from producing error messages and to direct visitors to the resources that they are looking for.

Which search queries return Wikiversity pages?

**Top search queries**
*(Downloaded Sep. 1, 2009)*
#	%	Query	Position
1	9%	independent variable	8
2	4%	principles of management	3
3	4%	wikimap	10
4	4%	wikibooks	9
5	3%	portugese	4
6	3%	farsi1	4
7	2%	filmmaking	5
8	2%	wiktionary	10
9	2%	principles of marketing	4
10	2%	introduction to computers	6

The Top search queries table lists the queries that return Wikiversity pages as results, while the Clicktrough table indicates searches where someone clicked on a Wikiversity page in the results.

A search for "independent variable" returns w:Dependent and independent variables as the first result and Independent variable is at #33. The high ranking of the Wikiversity page is likely due to two templates on the Wikipedia site.

It is no surprise that searches for Wikimedia Foundation sister sites like Wikibooks and Wiktionary return results for Wikiversity.

The "Farsi1" search results might seem a bit odd at first glance. There is a television station called Farsi1TV ("The television channel for the Farsi speaking community") and Wikiversity has Farsi 1 which is a beginner's course in the language.

For the high ranking of "Filmmaking" see the large number of sites that link to Filmmaking.

The results for principles of Management and principles of marketing are two of the most interesting. See the discussion in the section below.

Which search results are people clicking on?

**Clickthrough**
*(Downloaded Sep, 1, 2009)*
#	%	Query	Position
1	9%	principles of management	2
2	6%	passive sign convention	1
3	5%	principles of marketing	3
4	4%	eta squared	1
5	3%	programming logic	1
6	3%	greek vowel	3
7	3%	marketing principles	3
8	2%	exploratory factor analysis	1
9	2%	upper motor neuron vs lower motor neuron	1
10	2%	generic conventions	1
11	2%	wiki university	3
12	2%	common swedish phrases	1
13	2%	cohen's d	3
14	1%	partial eta squared	2
15	1%	airy stress function	1
16	1%	technical writing course	2
17	1%	circuit analysis	3
18	1%	ionize in water to release hydrogen ions and a negative ion other than hydroxide	1
19	1%	affective domain	2
20	1%	circuit analysis problems	2
21	1%	introduction to information technology	2
22	1%	oblique plane anatomy	4
23	1%	introduction to computer science	6
24	1%	management principles	6
25	<1%	types of interpersonal skills	1

The search for "principles of management" is an interesting result. According to Google 9% of the people who search for this term clickthrough to the Principles of Management page. Knowing this might allow us to focus some of our efforts on developing resources that people are seeking to learn about. We should also check these pages to insure that they are well linked to other wikiversity pages so that newcomers can easily learn more about subjects that they are interested in.

It is interesting that both "principles of management" and "management principles" appear in the top 25. As an experiment I have created a redirect from Management principles to Principles of Management to see if this will boost the ranking and clickthrough on the "management principles" search. It is tempting to do the same for Principles of marketing and Marketing principles but this will be left alone for now, to see what happens without any changes to Wikiversity.