Penza State University has improved its position in the web-ranking of the world educational establishments Webometrics Ranking of World Universities. PSU occupies 105th place among the universities of the Russian Federation (in July, 2015, it had 117th place) and 4,343th place in the world ranking (in July, 2015, it had 4,960th place).

Among the classical universities of the Volga Federal Region PSU has 8th place. PSU has made a considerable progress in the criteria “Presence”, the total volume of information on the main site, (it has grown by 1,118 points), and “Impact”, the number of external links to the site (it has grown by 770 points).

The other universities of the Penza Region have the following positions: Penza State Technological University is on the 410th place among the Russian universities and 10,070th place in the world ranking; Penza State University of Architecture and Construction has 457th and 11,005th places respectively; Penza State Agricultural Academy is on the 688th and 14,428th places.

The methodology of the ranking is based on four criteria, each of which evaluates the success of the university according to its position in the Internet and has a particular weight coefficient: “Presence” takes into account the total number of web pages located on the university domain indextied by Google (weight is 10%); “Impact” analyzed the number of back links to the university domain and the quality of this sources (weight is 50%); “Openness” considers the work of the university on forming its own archives of scientific publications in pdf formats indextied by Google (weight is 10 %); “Scientific Dominance” evaluates the number of scientific publications of the university which are in 10% most cited works of the corresponding research area over the last 5 years (weight is 30%).

Webometrics ranking influences the university evaluation in the world rankings of higher educational establishments such as Times Higher Education and  QS.