Design our 2010 Search Engine College T-Shirt – Quick!

What will Search Engine Colleges 2009 t-shirt look like?Last year we held a competition to design our 2009 T-shirt to help promote Search Engine College at SMX Sydney.

Well it’s that time of year again! We’re looking for some inspirational designs for our 2010 Search Engine College t-shirt. You can suggest a design within the comments of this blog and I’ll set up a poll for readers to vote for the winner.

The person behind the winning design will be announced on this blog and receive  a 2 day pass to SMX Sydney. [This is a single conference pass only and does NOT include travel, accommodation or a ticket to Under the Bridge.]

The winning design will be will be issued to all students who graduate from our Certification Pathways in 2010. If I get my act together in time, it may also be printed on our t-shirts scheduled for distribution to all attendees at SMX Sydney being held on 22-23 April.

Grab the blank tshirt front / back and the SEC logo and go play. Need some inspiration? Check out last year’s tee design finalists.

Competition rules are as follows:

1) Your design or slogan should be suggested within the comments of this post. You can link to a design on your own site or simply suggest a slogan in your comment.

2) Designs need to work on a white tshirt and should be no more than 2 colors.

3) The SEC logo and/or URL should appear somewhere in the design (on the back is fine)

4) Keep it clean. Unfortunately, some conference attendees and some of our students, may be offended by the use of curse words. If you need to curse, use an asterisk to censor your design somewhat. (Grrrr, I know I know).

5) Apart from the restriction of 4) your design can be as witty and creative as you like.

6) Due to my extreme procrastination and resulting print deadline, entries MUST close this Thursday 8 April 2010 at 5pm NZ time (GMT +12).

7) 5 finalists will be chosen by staff of Search Engine College and blog readers and Twitter followers will be given the opportunity to vote for their favorite finalists via a poll to be announced Thursday evening.

8 ) The final design winner will be announced on Monday 12 April 2010.

9) You MUST comment here to enter.

Good luck all!

Post Script:  Some of you have asked which tee won last year’s comp? It was the clever LOL Cat by Pete Newsome. I should also mention that we liked last year’s tee submission from the very talented Andrew Ballard so much, that we adopted his concept (with permission) as our new SEC logo. A revised web site featuring the new logo is in progress now. Thanks Andrew!

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Q and A: Does a copyright date on a web site affect SEO?

QuestionHi Kalena

I was asked a question recently that I wasn’t sure about regarding SEO. How much does a copyright date on a website affect its SEO? It would make sense that an updated copyright date would say ‘this site has updated content’ to the search engines. But does not having a copyright date, or having an outdated copyright date have a negative effect do you think?

Thank you!
Amy

Hi Amy

I’ve not seen any official post about this from Google or otherwise, but my understanding is that a copyright date has no impact whatsoever on SEO.

Anyone can add a copyright date to a page as part of the text or coded in as a HTML comment, whether that date is accurate or not. But for search engines to accurately measure when a page was first published or has since changed, they rely on comparing different cached versions of it, not on what a webmaster includes as a copyright date. It would be too easily manipulated otherwise.

Search engines also monitor domain registration details and change of ownership details to gain a more accurate knowledge of web site history.

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Off Duty Until Thursday

G’day readers

Just a short note to say I am currently on leave in Australia and so won’t be making any blog posts until next Thursday 23rd July.

I’ll only have sporadic Internet access too so if you’ve sent me an email or uploaded an assignment to grade, please note that it may take me a bit longer to respond.

Thanks for your patience and I’ll leave you in the capable hands of my Guest Bloggers Peter, Andy and Saurav.

Catch you on Thursday!

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