On the Importance of Hyperlinks: a Network Science Approach

Hyperlinks are the essence of the World Wide Web. Their importance is very high due to their ability to provide a visitor with a wealth of good quality information and for the role they play in the ranking of sites by modern search engines. This paper provides a network science approach to provide evidence to the importance of hyperlinking. We examine the webgraph of a tourism destination using graph theoretic methods to highlight the effects that the topological structure has on its navigability. Moreover, through a series of simulations performed on the representation of the real web network we show how a modest increase in the number of links may improve the visibility and the navigability of the destination's webspace.