Working with information in the modern world is an essential necessity, without which it is impossible to imagine the functioning and interaction of the vast majority of state structures.
For universities, this issue is one of the priorities, since the quality and methods of providing valuable information affect the awareness of not only employees and students, but also potential applicants, partners and public.
Euphrosyne Polotskaya State University of Polotsk is constantly working to improve information resources in order to improve the quality of content and traffic. This is evidenced by the indicators of the UniRank world university ranking, which has been maintaining its statistics since 2005.
UniRank rating (4icu) is based on the popularity and attendance of official websites of educational institutions, without taking into account academic and scientific achievements. UniRank aims to provide an approximate global ranking of the world's universities and colleges based on their web presence and popularity in terms of traffic score, trust/authority, and link popularity. The rating is designed to help international students and teachers understand how popular a particular higher education institution is in another country.
Universities and colleges are evaluated based on the following online databases:
- Moz Domain Authority indicates the number and quality of external links to the site according to the Google search engine
- Alexa Global Rank takes into account the number of users and the number of pages they have viewed in the Alexa system
- SimilarWeb Global Rank evaluates website traffic based on the monthly number of unique visitors and monthly page views
- Majestic Referring Domains indicates the number and quality of external links to the site according to the Majestic search engine
- Majestic Trust Flow determines the strength of links that are placed on the site
In the updated UniRank ranking published in January 2024, Euphrosyne Polotskaya State University of Polotsk ranks 4669th among world universities and 9th among Belarusian universities, rising by 1187 points in the world ranking and 6 positions in the country's ranking.
The ranking reflects the development of universities' social networks: the number of subscribers, content frequency, and user activity. In 2023, Polotsk University's social information resources demonstrated excellent dynamics thanks to the well-coordinated work of all employees, students, event organizers, partners, government agencies and the department of public relations.
The growth of indicators in the rating for the period from August 2023 to January 2024 is a natural result of positive experience in optimizing the site and social networks, improving the site quality index (PageRank), increasing the number of external links on international resources to the site and quoting resources on the Internet in general. By the beginning of 2024, there was a significant improvement in the position of resources in the Majestic service, which are used in accounting for the university personnel rating.
Arkady Larionov, Head of the Department of Public Relations: ‘We are constantly working on the development of our information resources. The site structure is constantly being improved, new projects and pages are being opened regularly, systematic work is being done on internal and external optimization, and activity is developing in the English-language and Belarusian versions of the site.
We care about the quality of our informational and visual content so that it is useful and attractive for all visitors. We are constantly looking for new ideas to attract the audience and are not even afraid to experiment. We attract students to our work, because young and talented students are always happy to participate in creative processes. Over the past year and a half, our social networks have made a significant step in their development: the citation index of our Telegram channel is constantly increasing. We are increasing cooperation and partnership relations with the mass media. All this gives positive results. There is still a lot of work ahead and a search for new solutions, which the friendly team of our department is constantly striving for.’
Arkady Larionov
The work done over the past year brings Polotsk University closer to the number of available information resources, the information structure of which is useful for students from different countries, potential partners, employees and people interested in the institution. The results indicated in the UniRank rating allow us to talk about choosing the optimal vector for the development of information resources, which will serve as a basis for improving our work in the future.