Web Presence and Impact Factors for Middle-Eastern Countries

This study investigates the Web presence and Web Impact Factor (WIF) for country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) of Middle-Eastern countries, and sub-level domains (SLDs) related to education and academic institutions in these countries. Counts of links to the web sites of Middle-Eastern countries were calculated from the output of Yahoo search engine. In this study, we compute the WIF at two levels: top-level domains, and sub-level domains. The results show that the Middle-Eastern countries, apart from Turkey, Israel and Iran, have a low web presence. On the other hand, their web sites have a low inlink WIF. Specific features of sites may affect a country’s Web Impact Factor. For linguistic reasons, Middle-Eastern web sites (Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew languages) may not receive and attract the attention that they deserve from the World Wide Web community