  The aggregation of web performance (page count and visibility) of internal
university units could constitute a more precise indicator than the overall web
performance of the universities and, therefore, be of use in the design of
university web rankings. In order to test this hypothesis, a longitudinal
analysis of the internal units of the Spanish university system was conducted
over the course of 2010. For the 13800 URLs identified, page count and
visibility was calculated using the Yahoo API. The internal values obtained
were aggregated by university and compared with the values obtained from the
analysis of the university general URLs. The results indicate that, although
the correlations between general and internal values are high, internal
performance is low in comparison to general performance, and that they give
rise to different performance rankings. The conclusion is that the aggregation
of unit performance is of limited use due to the low levels of internal
development of the websites, and so its use is not recommended for the design
of rankings. Despite this, the internal analysis enabled the detection of,
amongst other things, a low correlation between page count and visibility due
to the widespread use of subdirectories and problems accessing certain content.
