The Doodle 4 Google contest invites students in the United States, grades K-12, to use their artistic talents to redesign Google’s homepage logo. This year’s theme is “If I could travel in time, I’d visit…” The contest isn’t limited to schools. Parents, guardians, and after school programs can submit their students’ creations as well.

The winning student will see their artwork appear on the Google homepage and take home some cool prizes and, as a special bonus, the winning artwork will appear on a limited edition of Crayola’s 64 box!

Contest Info

Learn How to Enter

That’s where redirects come into play. There are several techniques that can be used to redirect an old page to a new one. Some are better than others and I won’t bore you with all the techno-mumble-jumble! All you really need to know is that if High Aspirations, Inc. redesigned your website, your redirects are already in place. There are always exceptions of course, like server and host limitations, but Marilyn and I do our best to put those redirects in place for our clients regardless of whether or not we designed the site being replaced.

If High Aspirations, Inc. isn’t redesigning your website (and why not? I ask!), make sure you talk to your designer about having redirects added to the project.

Google+ continues to grow. More features are being added and more are coming, including business pages which are rumored for later this year.

If your site isn’t taking advantage of social media, contact us to get your site connected with a Facebook fan page, Twitter account, LinkedIn account, Google Profile, and Google +1 button.

Read the original article at Website Magazine.

Twitter can be categorized as a social network like Facebook and Google+. I’ve also seen it called microblogging. Take your blog posts, articles, and news items and “condense” the story to within 140 characters including the URL to your “full-size” story and that’s your Tweet. Any URL entered into the Tweet box on Twitter will be automatically shortened to 19 characters leaving you with 121 characters for the rest of your Tweet.

You can find out a lot more at Twitter basics on Twitter’s Help Center.

For the last several months, Marilyn and I have been monitoring a growing situation in the site logs of the clients on maintenance. At first one site’s logs showed several Russian sites in their referrer logs and the next month there were a few more… more hits, more sites. We took notice, but didn’t act because the domain names were business in nature and I had recently done a search engine submission and there are legitimate Russian search engines out there. It wasn’t until non-business (I’m sure you know what I mean!) domain names started showing that we began to get concerned. My first thought was that these sites were attempting to find vulnerabilities in the code of the website to hack in and load the site with hidden links, hidden pages, or viruses. Luckily the client site in question contained little programming with the capability of being hacked so we had time to investigate.

In the meantime, Russian sites started showing up on our own referrer site logs. Now we’ve got to figure out what is happening because whatever it is, it’s spreading and our sites do contain programming and software that can be hacked. Of course we checked our “stuff” and made sure everything was up to date so any security holes would be patched, but still we were worried.

We discussed blocking the Russian sites, but there were many of them so either it was going to be a huge project requiring constant monitoring and updating or we would have to block all Russian sites which would prevent legitimate traffic. We decided against this route because if the sites visiting are up to no good, they aren’t going to behave and listen to our ‘do not enter’ rules anyway.

Marilyn did some research and viola, the cause was found… referrer SPAM! Here’s what she had to say…

Apparently these are what’s considered referrer spam. Sigh… Like we needed more! Anyway, it’s done so that people who publish their stats (or I guess don’t make them private in any way) end up publishing their URLs, which will get people to click them and therefore end up higher up in the search engine rankings because they’re linked from all over the web.

There’s also the scam where this guy would click on people’s pay-per-click (PPC) ads causing them tons of charges for the clicks – since he was using regular sounding names and not clicking quite enough to arouse suspicion it took a while before he got caught.

Marilyn recommends the following links if you want to research this further on your own. I’ve included Marilyn’s comments too!

• Blogger Help Forum Thread: Why am I being flooded with “referring sites and URLS” from Russia to one particular post, according to Stats? – support forum, basically people asking the same thing we did, about whether these domains are somehow hurting us or should be blocked, etc.
• Lyris HQ Blog: SEM Bad Guy Caught in the Act – article about the guy causing all the fraudulent PPC charges
• Tech Hacking: Stop Google Analytics Referrer Spam – more detailed info regarding referrer SPAM

With the cause found, we relaxed. The Russian sites weren’t trying to hack us or our clients and while their tactics aren’t anything I’d recommend or do, they aren’t causing any harm. None of our clients publish their stats or offer pay-per-click space on their sites. We have nothing to worry about and neither do our clients.

The longer answer is that Google’s +1 is a button added to your site. When visitors click that +1 button, they are giving a public stamp of approval on that page of your site, blog post, etc. Your visitors can then immediately add a comment and share that +1 click with their friends on Google+. When someone searching Google is logged into their Google account, the amount of +1s your site has received is displayed next to your listing as well as if any of their friends +1′d your site. Anyone logged into Google can also see all the +1s they’ve done in the past within their Google Profile.

You can find more information at the Google +1 Button site.

Don’t forget to check out High Aspirations, Inc.’s Google+ profile and click that Google+1 button below to add us to your +1′s.

If your site doesn’t yet have a Google+1 Button, please contact us and we’ll get it added to your site and set you up with you own Google Profile.

The longer answer is that Google+ is a collection of social products or apps. You have Stream (a newsfeed), Sparks (a recommendation engine), Hangouts (a video chat service), Huddle (a group texting service), Circles (a friend management service) and Photos. Google plans to add more products in the future.

You can find more information at Google+ or by reading Google+: The Complete Guide.

Don’t forget to check out High Aspirations, Inc.’s Google+ profile and click that Google+1 button below to add us to your +1′s.

I have begun using Tags on Tech Talk posts. All 2011 posts have been tagged now. I won’t be going further back simply because Tech Talk has been around since 2006 and that’s a lot of posts!

Why the sudden addition of Tags? I admit that I wasn’t a big fan of them when they first started getting popular. I found the giant listings of miscellaneously sized words annoying, distracting, and hard to work with. WordPress, High Aspirations, Inc.’s blog software of choice, didn’t handle them internally requiring additional software be added and quite honestly, I have enough trouble finding the time to work on my own site because clients come first! Now, WordPress has Tag support built in and as part of my own efforts to give my blog more attention, I’m making the leap.

Of course, there is the added search engine benefits. You can consider tags keywords on display! They are gobbled up by search engines! The more tags accurately match what’s written in a post, the more relevant they are ranked and the higher your blog shows up in the search engine results pages. I don’t have to tell you that having your blog rank higher is a good thing right?

Since Marilyn and I are always thinking about what’s best for our clients, I suggest you start using Tags while you blog too! If your site doesn’t show it’s tags and you’d like it to, just contact us and let us know.

Based on Google’s +1 button FAQ there is the potential for increased search engine visibility by adding this feature to your web site and/or blog.

This video from Google will help explain the +1 button:

Some important notes to help site owners:

• The +1 button should only be added to public pages on public sites. Google will crawl and index any page with the button code on it so you do not want it added to private or password protected pages, posts, or sections.
• All visitors will be able to see the +1 button on your site.
• A Google Profile is required to click the +1 button on your site.
• Your site’s visitor must be logged into their Google Account to see the +1 button information on their Google search results pages.
• There is no limit to the number of +1 buttons you can add to your site.
• The annotations that appear on the Google search results are currently only available in English.
• The Google +1 button is currently not available on mobile Google search results.

If you want to give it a try, look below my signature on the left. You’ll see the Google +1 button to the left of the Share/Save feature.

If you are a maintenance client and would like to have the Google +1 button added to your web site or blog, just let us know and we’ll get it done right away. If you are not on maintenance, please do not hesitate to contact us and we’ll give you a quote to do the project.

• Linking Sites Overview which will give an overview of sites linking to your web site.
• Ranking Analysis which will show the position of your web site in the search engine results.

If you don’t currently receive any search engine reporting but would like to, just contact us.