If you recently completed an online purchase, did you read a customer review or testimonial?  And if so, did it influence your purchase decision?  I'll take a guess that the answer to this is a firm "yes!"

Customer testimonials and online reviews are increasingly popular and extremely important for both marketer and shopper.  If your site does not contain customer-provided product reviews it is absolutely something you must consider.  And once you have a reputable review system on place, how to you get customers to interact and contribute? 

In his blog, the famous Googler Matt Cutts wrote in depth about canonical URLs and some of the reasons why www.yoursite.com can be seen as a different URL then yoursite.com, for example. This appears as the same content, but with different URLs and is typically unintentional.  For website owners, this issue can be a difficult one to address and can actually adversely effect your page rank.  Probably the most important fact from a search engine perspective is that the URLs are viewed as different and will both be indexed effectively "slicing" your page rank and index power instead of consolidating it.

Now, it appears, most search engines are working hard to address canonicalization.

Yahoo has launched three new advertising products that promise to be more effective in connecting advertisers with their target audiences. Yahoo's claim is that by observing user search behavior and activity on a site, a system can make adjustments to deliver the most relevant messages while obtaining the greatest ROI.  Hopefully, this will enable publishers to achieve better results for their ad spend while also providing the end user with more sophisticated and relevant click opportunities.

A recent Nielsen study on behalf of Tellabs, suggests that mobile Internet is no longer just a luxury, it’s a necessity and here to stay.

The study points out that 71% of U.S. consumers plan to use some type of mobile data service on a daily basis.  The study also goes on to state that among current mobile Internet users, 55% planned to increase their usage of mobile data services in the next two years, and 48% planned to increase their use over the next year. Among non-users, 29% planned to start during that same period. Expanded use of those mobile services, also including email, multimedia messaging and photo uploading, could also "explode" in the next two years.

Online retailers represent more than 30% of the search listings from a typical online retail search on a major search engine, while brick-and-mortar stores only show up in searches 12% of the time, according to an analysis of search-engine results by Internet-Engine.