Promo: novel metrics that combine hits and accessibility criteria in order to Promote important content and links

In this work, we introduce metrics and a proposed procedure to measure the popularity of a website. We present two novel metrics, Promo and Promo(2) that take advantage of the internal link structure of a website, in order to gain important navigation information. This is indicative of the difficulty the user encounters to access a particular link and can be combined with statistics gained from the log files as a metric of popularity. The two metrics propose a different definition of the popularity of a web object in order to generate a sorted list of promotion values for a website's links. We have delivered a web tool that implements the proposed procedure in order to facilitate a site designer to manipulate his/her web server log data, receive recommendations and popularity results and finally proceed with changes in the structure or position of links. Overall, the experimental study using user-based accesses log data, has been encouraging and it has verified the effectiveness of the Promo metrics.

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