A new approach to web co†link analysis

Numerous web co†link studies have analyzed a wide variety of websites ranging from those in the academic and business arena to those dealing with politics and governments. Such studies uncover rich information about these organizations. In recent years, however, there has been a dearth of co†link analysis, mainly due to the lack of sources from which co†link data can be collected directly. Although several commercial services such as Alexa provide inlink data, none provide co†link data. We propose a new approach to web co†link analysis that can alleviate this problem so that researchers can continue to mine the valuable information contained in co†link data. The proposed approach has two components: (a) generating co†link data from inlink data using a computer program; (b) analyzing co†link data at the site level in addition to the page level that previous co†link analyses have used. The site†level analysis has the potential of expanding co†link data sources. We tested this proposed approach by analyzing a group of websites focused on vaccination using Moz inlink data. We found that the approach is feasible, as we were able to generate co†link data from inlink data and analyze the co†link data with multidimensional scaling.