Cyber Monday has traditionally served as a sort of Ground Hog day for holiday shopping, or an early indicator of online sales for the season. Currently, a couple notable arrows are pointing to a very successful online shopping season: sales and seals. While CNN Money reports that Cyber Monday sales are up 20%, I'm happy to report that the number of VeriSign seals viewed on Cyber Monday is up 52% over the same number last year---another record year. We recently announced a new high water mark for overall seals viewed in a single day with more than 500 million. Cyber Monday broke that record as the seal was viewed just under 650 million times. And if we follow the same pattern as last year when Cyber Monday sales and seals viewed were trumped by "Green Monday,...

Last year during the holiday season, we announced that we'd seen more than 250 million VeriSign seals displayed on a single day. This October we saw that number exceed 500 million in a single day.

What is the source of this tremendous growth? It's two things in combination. First, the number of seals on sites is up. More sites display the seal, and those sites on the average are higher volume. In fact, just the seals displayed on sites in October matched the number of seals on the highest shopping day of 2009.

The second factor is the widespread presence of...

This new video goes over recent results of eyeball tracking testing to measure the attention shift when the VeriSign seal appears in your search results using our new Seal-in-Search capability. I presented this information at the recent Search Engine Strategies expo in San Francisco.

One of the features we offer with VeriSign SSL Certificates is what we call Seal-in-Search. Simply explained, VeriSign has forged relationships with outside parties that in some way interact with consumers as they're finding the sites to visit or do business with. Each of these parties displays a version of the VeriSign seal in its interface next to its listings for the sites that are secured with VeriSign SSL Certificates and/or the VeriSign Trust Seal.

Today we have high profile relationships in two categories. The first is comparison shopping sites. VeriSign seals display alongside their sites in TheFind and PriceGrabber. TheFind even...