OEDb's Online College Rankings 2008: Ranking by Peer Web Citations

Update: OEDb has released the 2009 rankings. This is an archived page from our 2008 rankings.

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.

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

• American InterContinental University: aiuonline.edu and aiuniv.edu.
• Colorado Technical University: coloradotech.edu and ctuonline.edu.
• Ellis College: We excluded results from nyit.edu as well as ellis.nyit.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: kaplanuniversity.edu, kaplan.edu, and kucampus.edu. We also excluded results from concordlawschool.edu.
• Liberty University: libertyu.edu, liberty.edu, and luonline.edu.
• National American University: national.edu and nauonline.edu.
• University of Phoenix: phoenix.edu and uophx.edu.
• Westwood College: westwood.edu and westwoodonline.edu.
• York Technical College: yorktech.com and yorktech.edu.

* 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.