Exploring website features for business information

Two previous webometrics studies found a relationship between the number of inlinks to a commercial site and the company's business performance measures. Thus inlink counts to commercial sites could be a potential source of business information. However, those studies examined top ranking information technology companies in the U.S. and China. Whether the above-mentioned relationship holds for all companies regardless of ranking and in other countries is unknown. The study reported in this paper investigated this question. The study includes all information technology companies in the U.S. and Canada and gathered both business performance data and website data for these companies. It found significant correlation between business performance measures and inlinks to the company websites. The correlation was still significant even after the size of the company and the website age were accounted for. The conclusion is robust to the search engine used for data collection. Data collection issues for webometrics research were also explored.