IV. Conclusions

A. PageRanks Received by HBCUs

As in March, The DLL is greatly encouraged by the PageRanks received by the Home Pages of most HBCUs in October.

• A large majority of HBCUs received PageRank = 7 or higher. This score was also received by the Home Pages of many well known majority educational institutions (Part II, Table B), e.g., Penn State, Villanova, and Washington & Lee. It is also the same score received by some very important governance agencies (Part III, Table C), e.g., the Supreme Court, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Republican National Committee (RNC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable.
  
  
• Five HBCU Home Pages -- Florida A&M University, Hampton University, Howard University, Jackson State University, and Xavier University -- received PageRank = 8, an excellent score that was also received by the Home Pages of some of the nation's leading majority institutions (Part II, Table B), e.g., NYU, Notre Dame, and Georgia Tech. Moreover, the tables in Part III show that Home Pages of the Department of Defense, the CIA, the Wall Street Journal, HBO, U.S. News and World Report -- among many others -- also received PageRank = 8..
  

B. Higher PageRanks

If most HBCUs are doing relatively well in these regards, how can they do even better? What can HBCUs do to receive higher PageRanks for their Web pages and thereby garner more attention to their past achievements and more potential support for their future programs? Google's own recommendations are straight-forward:

"In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our Webmaster Guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. Google's notes outline core concepts for maintaining a "Google-friendly" website."

Although Google's guidelines are useful, most HBCU Websites already incorporate most of their recommendations. One point, however, bears careful notice. The guidelines provide the following waning to Webmasters:

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

In plain English, if a Webmaster tries to scam Google's ranking system, Google may decide to make that Website disappear from its listings!!! ... :-(

C. Attracting More Important Links

Google's primary recommendation -- that Webmasters should try to increase the number of links to their Websites from other important Websites -- derives from the fact that PageRanks are based on the importance of a Website's outside links as well as on the number of links a Website receives. Of course, an HBCU Webmaster cannot force other Webmasters to provide such links. However, other Webmasters might provide these links voluntarily if the HBCU Website contained information that was "useful" or "interesting". This insight is so obvious that it would not seem to be worth noting. However, until recently, during the course of its monthly reviews of all HBCU Websites, the DLL was puzzled by the fact that most sites failed to post this kind of important information.

The good news is that a large number of HBCUs dramatically revised their Home Pages prior to the beginning of the Fall 2006 Semester. As could be expected from such a disparate group, each of the new Home Pages is strikingly different from the others. Nevertheless, they all seem to have an important feature in common: their revisions enable visitors to quickly determine what's new at the HBCU. It would appear that many HBCUs have recognized that their Home Pages are the covers of online magazines whose primary purpose is to alert their visitors about the most important news that's inside -- research, sports, faculty/staff appointments, donations, academic awards, Homecomings, or whatever. Indeed it's possible that this widespread movement to provide news that Website visitors can use may be responsible for the generally higher PageRanks noted in this report. The Web Teams that provided these improved services for their HBCUs should be highly commended.

D. Final Words

Most HBCU Websites have clearly come a long way since the DLL published its last "Website Ratings" back in March 2003. While there is always room for improvement, the higher visibility of HBCUs in cyberspace is very, very encouraging. ... :-)