Is the findability of the institutional homepage really all that relevant here? It should be dead easy to find the website of a university you know the name of, which is partly what was being analysed here (although I skimmed rather than read the article).
It probably helps the rest of the site to have a more visible home page, but I guess there is a tension between the amount of content and structure on the home page and clutter that is confusing for visitors.
I would have thought that the real test of university website search optimization would be if its relevant internal pages were easier to find compared to alternate sites (competitors, similar subject, noise) for topics (courses, research papers) that people were looking for regardless of institution. However, that would probably have been more difficult to analyse (unless you are comparing specific items common across institutions).
Tavis Reddick
ICT Services
Fife College
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Jackson
<snip>
An interesting, detailed analysis of UK HEI homepages & SEO: http://www.informationr.net/ir/18-4/paper599.html.
</snip>
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