Выпуск: 4 , Том: 42 , Год издания: 2015

The currently existing webometric rankings and methods of their analysis are focused primarily on the quantitative measurement of the contents of websites and almost completely ignore the study of the user audience (web traffic). In a pilot project the traffic of ten websites of scientific organizations has been studied with the emphasis on web-traffic sources and the analysis of the traffic of pages with scientific content. It is shown that the direct visits to the site are an indicator of the regular audience of an organization website. This audience consists mainly of the organization's staff and their immediate colleagues, while new visitors come mainly from search engines. It was revealed that the most visited pages are the ones with information about staff and laboratories, as well as news pages if they are regularly updated. It was found that there is no strong relationship between webometric rankings and website traffic. The rank correlation is moderate and traffic from external links on other websites is weak despite the fact that such links are a key webometric indicator. The results of the study can be used to optimize the structures of the websites of scientific organizations and the analysis of their user audience