According to the latest Ranking Web results published at the end of July 2012, out of the Baltic HEIs, the Lithuanian and Estonian universities have attained comparably sound results being among the best 700 HEIs globally. It’s noteworthy that the highest rank has been achieved by the Estonian Tartu University which has been acknowledged as the Top 385^th globally. The Lithuanian HEIs have demonstrated the best overall results among the three countries, where the Vilnius University and Kaunas University of Technology have occupied the 593^th and 617^th rank accordingly. The Latvian HEIs demonstrate comparably weaker positions, being led by the University of Latvia, ranked 794^th and the Riga Technical University, ranked 1,403^rd (see Figure 1 below).

According to the previous Webometrics ranking results published in January 2012, the position of the University of Latvia, which was ranked 822^nd, have now improved, whereas in the previous Webometrics edition the Riga Technical University was in better positions (ranked 915^th).

Figure 1. Ranks of the Baltic HEIs in Webometrics, July 2012.

It should be noted, however, that Webometrics has adopted several key changes for the current edition published at the end of July 2012. The current composite indicator is now built as follows:

• PRESENCE (20%). The global volume of contents published on the university webdomains as indexed by the largest commercial search engine (Google).It counts every webpage, including all the formats recognised individually by Google, both static and dynamic pages. For the purposes of the Ranking the web presence is a good proxy of the activities performed by the Universities in the 21st century.
• IMPACT (50%). The quality of the contents is evaluated through a "virtual referendum", counting all the external inlinks that the University webdomain receives from third parties. Those links are recognising the institutional prestige, the academic performance, the value of the information, and the usefulness of the services as introduced in the webpages according to the criteria of millions of web editors from all over the world. The link visibility data is collected from the two most important providers of this information: Majestic SEO and ahrefs, that provides an overlapping scenario very close to a true global coverage.
• OPENNESS (15%). The global effort to set up institutional research repositories is explicitly recognized in this indicator
  that takes into account the number of rich files (pdf, doc, docx, ppt) published in dedicated websites according to the academic search engine Google Scholar.Only correctly formed file names are considered (for example, the Adobe Acrobat files should end with the suffix .pdf) for the period 2007-2011.
• EXCELLENCE (15%). The academic papers published in high impact international journals are playing a very important role in the ranking of Universities. Deepening the commitment to this measurement started in previous edition Webometrics has introduced the Excellence indicator, the university scientific output being part of the 10% of the most cited papers in their respective scientific fields. Although this is a measure of high quality output of research institutions, the data provider Scimago groupsupplied non-zero values for more than 5,200 universities (period 2003-2010).

Source: Webometrics