OEDb's Online College Rankings 2009: Ranking by Peer Web Citations

The peer Web citations metric could be considered a proxy for a college's relative status among other colleges. Using Yahoo! Search's linkdomain:example.edu site:.edu -site:example.edu backlink command (where example.edu is the college's domain name), we can find out how many times a particular college's Web site is linked to by other college's Web sites. The site:.edu portion of the search operator weeds out backlinks from non-academic Web sites. The -site:example.edu portion of the search operator weeds out any internal linking from the college's own Web site. All searches were conducted on December 4, 2008. We used Yahoo! Site Explorer rather than Google because Google returns only a random sample with its link: operator.

Note: For some colleges, we searched for links to multiple domains:

• American InterContinental University: aiuonline.edu and aiuniv.edu.
• Capella University: capella.edu and capellauniversity.edu.
• Colorado Technical University: coloradotech.edu and ctuonline.edu.
• Dickinson State University: nodak.edu and dickinsonstate.edu.
• Everest College: everest.edu, everestonline.edu, and everestcollege.edu.
• Florida National College: florida-national.edu and fnc.edu.
• Grand Canyon University: grand-canyon.edu and gcu.edu.
• Herzing College: herzingonline.edu and herzing.edu.
• ITT Technical Institute: itt-tech.edu and itttech.edu.
• Jones International University: jonesinternational.edu, jiu.edu, and international.edu.
• Kaplan University: kaplan.edu, kaplanuniversity.edu, and kucampus.edu.
• Keiser University: keiseruniversity.edu and keisercareer.edu.
• LeTourneau University: letu.edu and letourneau.edu.
• Liberty University: libertyu.edu, liberty.edu, lbts.edu, and luonline.edu.
• National American University: national.edu and nauonline.edu.
• Rasmussen College: rasmussen.edu and rasmussenonline.edu.
• University of Phoenix: phoenix.edu and uophx.edu.
• Westwood College: westwood.edu and westwoodonline.edu.
• York Technical College: yorktech.com and yorktech.edu.

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OEDb's Online College Rankings ranks 44 of the nation's top online colleges by eight different metrics. Please read more about this study or about our methodology for additional information.