The Quality of the Websites of Agritourism Farms in Visegrad Group Countries in the Light of Selected Synthetic Measures

Subject and purpose of work: The aim of the work was to evaluate the quality of the websites of agritourism farms in the Visegrad Group countries. Materials and methods: Evaluation of website quality was based on selected “site authority” measures, from the so-called SEO metrics: Trust Rank, Moz Rank and Page Authority, as well as measurement of the selected performance parameters of websites. The research was conducted on a group of 400 websites of agritourism farms, whose addresses were obtained from selected web directories. Results: In the case of as many as 331 sites (approx. 83%) Trust Rank lower than 1 point was recorded. The majority of tested websites are characterised by an average value of the Moz Rank index and a low value of the Page Authority index. The average time taken to load the website in the browser window for the first time was about 2.7 seconds, with as many as 68 (17%) websites being loaded in over 5 seconds. Conclusions: The tested websites are characterised by low values of the authority index, which may indicate poor quality, poor visibility in search results and a lack of recommendations from other valuable sites. Low index values may also mean that, despite the global potential, the tested websites have a merely local impact. Their existence is known to a small number of people and their Internet visibility is negligible or nonexistent. Websites published in such a manner do not fulfil their function.

Web directories: selected features and their impact on directory quality

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is statistical examination of nearly 7,000 web directories and an analysis of factors which affect their quality measured by PageRank. Design/methodology/approach – The authors analysed 6,821 directories registered at www.katalogiseo.info/. The following information about the directories was examined: the year of registration on the website, the directory’s PageRank value, the existence of an active IP address, backlink requests, a fee charged for submission to the directory, as well as directory moderation and subject. Statistical analyses were performed with the use of Microsoft Excel, version 2010, and R software, version 3.0.0. The PageRank values were collected with a software written in Python. Findings – The study has shown a gradual increase in popularity of directories as one of the basic tools in search engine optimisation. The analysis has indicated a relatively high percentage of spam web directories. The evidence of this is the number of directories with undetermined PageRank values. The study revealed that careful management of a directory and its subject have key impact on directory quality measured by PageRank. Originality/value – Relatively few publications focus on the problem of web directories which represent a very large group of websites created solely to manipulate web search engine rankings. This paper discusses the phenomenon of web directories, reveals the percentage of spam directories, and factors which affect their quality measured by PageRank.

TODE

In this paper we study how we can organize the continuously proliferating Web content into topical cate-gories, also known as Web directories. In this respect, we have implemented a system, named TODE that uses a Topical Ontology for Directories’ Editing. First, we describe the process for building our ontol-ogy of Web topics, which are treated in TODE as directories’ topics. Then, we present how TODE inter-acts with the ontology in order to categorize Web pages into the ontology’s topics and we experimentally study our system’s efficiency in grouping Web pages thematically. We evaluate TODE’s performance by comparing its resulting categorization for a number of pages to the categorization the same pages dis-play in Google Directory as well as to the categorizations delivered for the same set of pages and topics by a Bayesian classifier. Results indicate that our model has a noticeable potential in reducing the hu-man-effort overheads associated with populating Web directories. Furthermore, experimental results im-ply that the use of a rich topical ontology increases significantly classification accuracy for dynamic con-tents.

Web Directories for Information Organization on Web Portals

Two methods are currently used to organize and retrieve information on the Internet. Search engines like Google and AltaVista use a robot-based keyword searching method by constructing inverted index files for Web pages and matching users’ query terms with the index terms. The other method organizes human-selected Internet resources into a searchable database, and gives users structured hierarchical access to the database in a similar way to browsing through library classification schemes. We call this structured hierarchical system a Web directory. Knowledge structures, like a library classification schema or a Web directory, visualize and reflect what people know about things, and help people understand things better, identify gaps, recognize patterns, predict future trends, and so forth (Kwasnik, 2005). Moreover, Web directories offer quality control and give access only to selected Internet resources. All these advantages make the browsing structure based on subject classification a desirable complement to the search engine type service (Koch, Day, Brümmer, Hiom, Peereboom, Poulter, & Worsfold, 1997).