International Journal of Library and Information Studies Vol.4 (2) Apr-Jun, 2014 ISSN: 2231-4911 62 LINK ANALYSIS OF WEBSITES OF UNIVERSITIES IN KERALA: A WEBOMETRIC STUDY Dr. R. JEYSHANKAR Assistant Professor Department of Library and Information Science Alagappa University Karaikudi – 630 003 Tamil Nadu Email: jeyshankar71@gmail.com Dr. I. MARIA SUJITHA Teaching Assistant Department of Library and Information Science Alagappa University, Karaikudi – 630 003 Tamil Nadu ABSTRACT The websites become important for every institution as it plays the role of dissemination of information about the institution in a well versed manner. The study on the websites of universities in Kerala analyzes the number of webpages, various links such as Inlinks, Self links and External links of websites by collecting information from the internet by applying proper syntax or commands. Also it calculates the Web Impact Factor of each kind of links for every websites in Kerala. The universities are ranked according to the various parameters and are analyzed. Keywords: Webometrics, Number of Webpages, Inlinks, Self links and External links, Web Impact Factor. INTRODUCTION Webometrics, the quantitative study of Web phenomena, is a field encompassing contributions from information science, computer science, and statistical physics as stated by Thelwall and Vaughan (2004) 1. Its methodology draws especially from bibliometrics. Hyperlinks on the Web can be created for probably as many reasons as there are Web sites. It is reasonable to assume that for instance hyperlinks to a Municipal Web site in Tamil Nadu are not created for the same reasons as hyperlinks to the University of Kerala Web site. There is no control or quality assurance for what can be published and what kind of hyperlinks can be created on the Web. Yet there seems to be some underlying information in the hyperlinks that can be used in webometric studies to map trends and relationships (Holmberg, K. 2010) 2 . In webometric studies, hyperlinks are assumed to indicate some offline relationships between the organizations represented by the Web sites. Link counts have been shown to correlate with measures describing business performance (Vaughan 2004) 3 and with research ratings (Smith and Thelwall 2002 4 ; Li et al. 2003) 5 . Different types of linking have also been studied. Interlinking has been found to correlate with geographic patterns ( Holmberg and Thelwall 2009) 7 and co-inlinking has been found to be a possible tool for mapping business competitive patterns (Vaughan et al. 2008) 8 . Links have been shown to have sometimes an offline creation