Do academic link types change over time?

Purpose – This paper seeks to address the question: do university web sites publish the same kind of information and use the same kind of hyperlinks year on year or do these change over time? Design/methodology/approach – A link classification exercise is used to identify temporal changes in the distribution of different types of academic web links changes, using the academic web spaces of the UK, Australia and New Zealand in the years 2000 and 2006. Findings – Significant increases in “research oriented”, “social/leisure” and “superficial” links were identified as well as notable decreases in “technical” and “personal” links. Some of these changes identified may be explained by general changes in the management of university web sites and some by more wide‐spread internet trends, e.g. dynamic pages, blogs and social networking. The increase in the proportion of research‐oriented links is particularly hopeful for future link analysis research. Originality/value – This is an important issue from the perspective of interpreting the results of academic web analyses, because changes in link types over time would also force interpretations of link analyses to change over time.