Information Systems Research, 2010, Volume 21,
Issue 2, Page 345-364.
The World Wide Web has become a key intermediary between producers and consumers of information. Web's linkage structure has been exploited by contemporary search engines to decrease the search cost for consumers while usually also rewarding the producers of higher status Web pages. In addition to influencing visibility and accessibility, in-links, as marks of recognition, accord status to a Web page. In this paper we show how Web page status may be predicted at least in part by page location and topic specificity. Moreover, we observe that the "philanthropic" contributions of a Web page-specifically, contributions of information brokerage function-are also good predictors of in-links. The observations are made in the presence of domainand topic-specific effects. Interestingly, all of these features that may predict status are "local" to a given Web page and within the control of the owner/author of the page. This is in contrast to the "global" nature of Web linkage-based metrics such as in-link count that are derived as a result of downloading and indexing billions of pages. Because the linkage structure of the Web affects browsing, crawling, and retrieval, our results have implications for vertical and general search, business intelligence, and content management.
Keywords: influence; search engine marketing; status; Web search; Web visibility