Abstract
It is known that there are significant correlations between linking and geographical patterns. Although interlinking patterns have been studied in various contexts, co-inlinking patterns on the Web have only been studied as indicator of business competitive positions. This research studies the use of co-inlinks to local government Web sites, assesses whether co-inlinking follows geographic patterns and investigates reasons for creating the co-inlinks. Strong evidence was found that co-inlinking is more frequent to municipalities in the same functional region than to municipalities in different functional regions, indicating that this geographic aspect influences co-inlinking, even though geographic co-inlinking was not a strong trend overall. Because the functional regions are created based on cooperation between the municipalities, we have indirectly been able to map cooperation from co-inlinking patterns on the Web. The main reason to create co-inlinking links to municipalities was that the source of the links wanted to show a connection to its region.
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Holmberg, K. Co-inlinking to a municipal Web space: a webometric and content analysis. Scientometrics 83, 851–862 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0148-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-009-0148-1