Google Ranked Number One In Canada

According to search results conducted by comscore, Google has been ranked as the most highly visited website in Canada. It has been given the top position in January, having a total of 22.44 million visitors during that month.
In a close second position was Microsoft, having a total of more than 22.42 million visitors. Yahoo! came in third having a total of 16.48 million visitors. Forth and fifth places were awarded to Facebook and eBay, having a total of 15.85 million and 13.35 respectively.

During the month of January, 2.67 million Canadians were the visitors of Softvoyage.com travel service website. This figure represents an increment of 53% as compared to the month of December 2007.
Following in the same footsteps are Workopolis.com 49%, Monster Worldwide 41%, and JobBank.gc.ca 40% increment.

Brent Bernie, President of comscore Canada stated, “Several job sites such as Monster, Workopolis and JobBank achieved significant gains in January as many Canadians resolved to improve their careers in 2008.” Furthermore, “the extreme cold weather and record breaking snow levels in Canada have driven the Canadians to travel entities on the web in hopes of finding warmer destinations.”

Retailers Keen On M Commerce

Most retailers are toying with the idea of adding a mobile channel in the next couple of years. Analyst Gartner is doing research in order to realise how the new age consumers would want to use their mobiles for the purpose of shopping. It can be for activities like locating the stores or for price comparison or for that matter anything.

In a survey conducted for more than 2,000 UK consumers as well as US consumers, Gartner found out that shoppers are around twice as likely to check the prices of a commodity over the phone rather than making an outright purchase. Thus, the services that are offered by various portals, mobile mappers and price-comparison engines need to be used by retailers in order to set up a workable m-commerce strategy. The survey also mentioned that the younger consumers are more likely to conduct their retail activity on the mobile as compared to their older counterparts.

Gartner also added that the m-commerce vendors need to provide “multichannel capabilities” in order to customize the manner the consumers want to shop. For example, they can enable mobile-phone-generated orders that can be collected at some store. Or they can allow the customers to save a mobile shopping session that they can continue sometime else at some other place.

Yahoo! Discovered Yahoo! Buzz

A new discovery by Yahoo! called Yahoo! Buzz has been released in Beta. It mainly collects information in the form of consumer votes related to major news, headline stories and interesting videos. The most popular and highly voted stories, videos and news, are then placed on Yahoo.com webpage. The higher the votes and popularity, the more the “Buzz Scores” will be allocated to them and placed accordingly on the homepage of Yahoo.com.

Jeff Weiner, the executive vice president of Yahoo, commented on this, “Yahoo! Buzz is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo! more socially and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers.”

Besides the executive vice president, the Vice President of Yahoo’s network service stated that it is “building on the recent success of the homepage of Yahoo!” and getting better and putting together popular stories from the “wisdom of real people to determine what is most engaging and relevant”.

Yahoo has also re-launched a video site giving it a definition as “far ahead of what most sites are offering”. This launch has taken place despite the news surrounding the Microsoft’s deal.

Google Adsense Revamps Terms And Conditions

If you are a publisher with AdSense, then get ready for some changes to the Ts and Cs. Do not be surprised if the next time you log on to your AdSense account, an entirely new window is displayed comprising of very wordy texts. AdSense is now asking publishers to accept their new terms and conditions. However, that does not mean that you will have to read through the entire text in order to find out what has been changed from the past AdSense Terms of Conditions.

AdSense has highlighted in their blog the change in their Terms and Conditions clearly dividing the changes in two groups - new features and products and privacy requirements.

The other change to the new AdSense terms and conditions is linked to the privacy policy of Google. The policy stresses the requirement for publishers to inform their users of cookies and/or web beacons to accumulate data in the ad serving process. This policy is also applicable to the use of products and features of the advertisers.

Flickr Encourages Nofollow Tags

Recently, Flickr – the photo sharing site has started using nofollow tags in its individual photo descriptions. So why will the users be bothered? There are basically two ways to view this. The first one is that the nofollow links present in the descriptions of individual photos may result in discouraging specific search engine optimizers from posting their photos on the site. In a way, it is good as the ones who will get easily discouraged will be spammers who are on the lookout of cheap link juice. As a result, genuine search engine optimizers and webmasters seem to suffer.

The other way to look at this is that Flickr practices selling the paid links. Flickr members are allowed only three Sets. This basically means that free members have access to a limited number of links that they can add. Only paid members are allowed more than three Sets. They have the privilege of unlimited link juice at their disposal. Thus, Flickr is a link seller. The bottom line is that genuine search engine optimizers will always find ways to procure good links. At the same time, spammers will also find ways to take advantage of the system.