Can you see us now? A study on web site visibility

With an ever expanding content and user base, the Web presents information discovery and consumption challenges for both consumers and producers of information. Producers of information strive for visibility among consumers who in turn struggle to find relevant information among the billions of web pages. In this paper we study web site visibility for more than 2500 public companies from the Russell 3000 index and its association with properties of these sites. One property that is of particular interest to us is the availability of "community" pages, i.e., pages that support blogs or forums on the web site. We measure visibility in three different ways - total in-links to pages on the web site, in-links to the home page, and user traffic to the web site. We find that web sites with larger number of community pages are associated with higher visibility. This provides a novel empirical support for the use of Web 2.0 tools on company web sites. We also find that web sites with more specific content or "deep" structure are associated with lower visibility while providing out-links is associated with higher visibility. We observe consistent results with all of the different measures of visibility. These associations are observed while controlling for size of the firms and the size of their web sites. Our results present evidence on the value of common goods and services provided by firms that may help in improving their web site visibility.