Online College 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 January 15, 2008. We used Yahoo! Site Explorer rather than Google because Google returns only a random sample with its link: operator.

RankCollegePeer Web Citations
1Nova Southeastern University11,000
2Franklin University1,680
3Walden University 1,480
4California University of Pennsylvania1,220
5University of Phoenix1,038
6Regent University982
7Granite State College968
8National University796
9Capella University530
10Western Governors University506
11Tiffin University475
12Liberty University466
13Upper Iowa University429
14American InterContinental University423
15Dickinson State University383
16LeTourneau University316
17ITT Technical Institute290
18Fisher College274
19Champlain College266
20Bellevue University265
21Jones International University263
22City University247
23Grand Canyon University202
24Kaplan University193
25Darton College165
26Florida Metropolitan University *157
27Western International University150
28Westwood College143
29Colorado Technical University124
30National American University122
31Berkeley College113
32Peirce College Online 110
33South University106
34Herzing College71
35York Technical College69
36Grantham University68
37Post University43
38Salem International University26
39Ellis College12
39Florida National College12
41Everglades University4

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

* Note: Florida Metropolitan University is now known as Everest University (online at everest.edu), but for the purposes of collecting data for this metric, we used the Web address fmu.edu, since these name and Web address changes only happened on November 5, 2007.

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OEDb's Online College Rankings ranks 41 of the nation's top online colleges by eight different metrics. Please read more about this study or about our methodology for additional information.