Is Data Quality an Influential Factor on Web Portals’ Visibility?☆

Abstract Since most Internet users limit their search scope to first page of search results and use the obtained information for decision making, logically search engines must give higher ranks to the websites with high quality data. In this research, a case study is conducted on dataset of 44 web portals of universities in Malaysia. The data quality level of these portals is assessed and the results are compared with their visibility on search engines. Our results showed that the portals with the best data quality are not necessarily the most visible. Therefore, we believe that search engines do not sufficiently correlate quality of content with website visibility.