It was announced yesterday by MarketWatch that “the approval ratings for President George W. Bush have hit a new low, as only 25% of Americans like the way the nation’s 43rd chief executive has performed, according to the most recent survey from Gallup Poll.”

As readers of this site know, we often like to explore current SEO tactics as they apply to current events and after reading this article I was curious.  I decided to check out the President’s web site and noticed that its Google PageRank also dropped from a 10/10 to a 9/10.  It appears Google has also lost hope for the current administration as well!

What can be made of this new evaluation by the Google gods bots?  Has Google moved over to support the Dem’s and condemn the GOP?  Unlikely, as Barack Obama and John McCain both now support a PageRank of 8/10 (an increase from 7/10 last reporting period) so no favortism appears present there.  Perhaps it is much like the general sentiment of the American public…  that we would just like a change or shift in power to a new leader with a different set of policies.  A set of policies that can hopefully propel us out of this cesspool that the Bush administration drowned us in the past 8 years.

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As many SEO experts know, links play a huge part in search engine optimization results.  It is especially inbound links with “dofollow” flags that are of the most importance.

Google has often been hush on the issue but it appears they are finally addressing the relevance of all types of links during a 4 day online blog seminar entitled “link week” written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead.

Maile plans to cover the following during link week:

Day 2: Internal links (links within your site)
Day 3: Outbound links (sites you link to)
Day 4: Inbound links (sites linking to you)

You can view the blog here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/links-information-straight-from-source.html

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On September 9th, 2008, Google crawler bots did what they always do.  They crawled sites world wide looking for relevant information to index in its plethora of portals and sites that it operates.  But on this date, Google bots picked up one story that it wasn’t supposed to.  An archived story that happened to appear on the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s site, that a curious user happened to stumble upon at 1:30AM.  A time when the site has very low traffic, which happened to boost this specific article to the Sun’s “Popular Stories” section and then onto the “Most Viewed Articles” section on their front page.  That single visit in the early hours of Sunday morning caused all hell to break loose!  The article that was moved onto the first page was indeed an article from 2002 in which United Airlines (UAL) filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.

There was another problem.  The article wasn’t dated, and appeared to Google bots as a valid breaking news story since it was posted to a new url!

At 1:37am, an automated Google bot crawled through the paper’s site for new stories and spotted the link.

Google says its program scanned the piece and, seeing there was no 2002 dateline, indexed the article for inclusion on its news pages.

Three minutes and two seconds later, Google News readers started viewing the story on the Sun Sentinel’s web site.

What ensued next was sheer madness.  A Florida investment firm spotted the news story on the site, and submitted it to Bloomberg financial information network.  A financial news network monitored constantly by investment managers and stock traders worldwide!

A Bloomberg News staffer found the bankruptcy story on the Sun Sentinel site and, at 11:07a.m., posted a headline about the bankruptcy.

Investors then dumped UAL stock at a huge rate, triggering panic and automatic stop losses.  The stock shedded more than 75% of its value and plunged from $12 per share to $3 per share until trading was halted.

Trading resumed later that day after the mess was sorted out and determined that a false bankruptsy news story was to blame.  Shares climbed back up to $11 from $3 later in the day, but there are many who are now looking at large losses due to this blunder.

The SEC is investigating, but who is to blame?  We are in an instant informational age and sometimes it can cause true anarchy.  A somewhat scary thought…

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As far back as I can remember I have always liked to take things apart and put them back together.  This inner desire to understand how things worked was very intriguing to me.  It all started at a very young age, unscrewing any electronic component (calculators, radios, etc) I could find around the house and then putting it back together.  This was taken to another level once my parents bought me my very own computer in 9th grade; a Pentium 200MMX with 64MB EDO RAM.  I was thrilled, and I began to play with my new toy day and night learning the intricacies of the system.

All of this excitement was brought to a sudden halt once I decided to explore how this software actually worked on this new system I had just received.  I was amazed that I could not see the source code of any of the programs I had installed.  Everything was hidden behind a pretty exterior shell that read “Microsoft Windows”.  I was eager to learn, but I was being held back; not only by this pretty exterior shell, but also by the exorbitant cost of software associated with this operating system.  A cost which was way out of any 9th grader’s budget!

I was very upset.  Eager to learn about systems, networking and programming I started to research alternatives, and came across free open source software.  The first project I came across was a popular project entitled “Linux”; a Unix-like operating system which is not only free, but also contains open source code and development allowing all underlying source code to be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone.  I was ecstatic!  Not only did I find software that was within my budget (free), I also found software that had it’s source fully available for me to study and learn.

After installing Linux for the first time, I was amazed at the plethora of other free software packages that were packaged along side of it, all with source available.  I could edit the software, make it better, add my own functionality, the possibilities were endless!  It was these free software packages that allowed me to explore and actually learn networking, programming and system administration.  Without these free open source software packages, I would have never been as interested in the computer industry as I am today.

It is very apparent that open source software promotes education and innovation, while closed source software stifles it.  As the great Albert Einstein once said:

“Example isn’t another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.”

And closed source software is a very poor example…

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