We closed the 2009 Dating Sites Reviews Single's Choice Award poll last month (Feb. 18) with a total of 705 votes from the public. This is over 100 more votes than last year's Single's Choice Awards. It is good to see people participating in the poll since ultimately it is online daters like yourselves who decide which service becomes the popular one to use. Plus, singles who visit our site and are new to online dating use our awards as a tool to indicate which dating sites to try out first.

As with last year we listed the top 10 dating sites for our visitors to vote on. The top 3 voted dating sites got an award, Gold, Silver and Bronze. The one thing we did different this year was we added a second question to our poll asking which free dating site would be your top choice for an award. To find out the answer to this question, check out this story.

The recipient of the Gold 2009 Singles's Choice Award is Match.com. This is the third year in a row that this dating site has won the Gold Single's Choice Award which shows Match.com continues to be the market leader in online dating. Match.com has a proven record of success and many members worldwide who know if you want to be serious about finding a partner, Match.com is the leading dating site to join. This year Match.com received 2 percent more votes than in 2008 for a total of 201 (29% of the total vote).

The recipient of the Silver 2009 Singles's Choice Award is eHarmony. This is eHarmony's second year to win this award. They earned 22 percent of the votes (same as last year) which was 153 total votes out of 705. The dating site with the famous matching system certainly had a number of changes this year. There was new features added, profile tweaks and a successful Facebook fan page.

The recipient of the Bronze 2009 Singles's Choice Award is Yahoo! Personals. Yahoo also won this award last year as well except they slipped 2 percent this year and ended up with 11 percent of the total vote, which means they had 74 votes. While Yahoo may have taken 3rd place they still run a first rate dating service. All you have to do is log into their dating site to find out why.

This year's standings for the Single's Choice award for all dating sites in the poll are (click the dating site name to read our full review):

1. Match.com
2. eHarmony
3. Yahoo! Personals
4. Chemistry
5. Lavalife
6. SinglesNet.com
7. PerfectMatch.com
8. FriendFinder.com
9. True.com
10. Date.com

We would like to give a big THANKS to everyone who participated this year in the Single's Choice Award.

It looks like the rumor was true (see Story), Match.com released a press release yesterday which confirm that they have made a deal to acquire the dating site Singlesnet.com. Financial terms of the deal have yet to be released but Match CEO Greg Blatt did state that Singlesnet will continue to be run largely as a standalone business. Adrian Ong of Match.com will be taking over the helm from the previous owner of Singlesnet, Quinn Lipin. Mr Lipin will still continue to work for Singlesnet.com as an executive.

Singlesnet was once the most visited dating site in the USA back in December 2008. Since then traffic has slowly declined with a major drop happening in February 2009 from 7 million unique visitors to just under 5 million.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, eHarmony here in the United States and Canada is planning to have their 23rd free communication weekend (FCW) starting Thursday February 11th, 2010 to Monday February 15th, 2010.

During this 5 day eHarmony free communication weekend, all members will be able to review matches and to communicate with these matches for no cost. The month of February and especially around Valentine's Day is when dating sites are the busiest. This means if you haven't tried eHarmony yet, this is your best chance to see how it works and what type of matches they have in your area. As with previous FCWs, members will not be able to FastTrack the guided communication process. Member's photos also are also not viewable for this promotion.

The last eHarmony free communication event occurred during New Years Eve (see Story).

Check out our review of eHarmony for more information on the dating site.

Singles interested in the United Kingdom Free Communication Weekend, read this News Story.

Update: I see that the Australian eHarmony dating site is having a FCW as well but it runs from Friday Feb.12th to Feb. 15th.

We would like to welcome Moxie as a new contributor here at DatingSitesReviews.com. She has been writing her own online dating and sex advice column called "And That's Why You're Single" for over 5 years now and has shown she has valuable insight on relationships and what makes men and women tick. You can now expect to find Moxie offering the same valuable advice and tips here, which can be used to help you with dating, both online and off.

To find out more about our fourth writer, Moxie, visit her Bio page. You may also use this form to contact her, if you wish to ask her questions or to suggest a topic for her next article.

Tom

We have just completed a first in a series of updates to the user rating and review system here at DatingSitesReviews.com. The major new component in this update is each user review will have its own page (instead of having 6 per page as before). This change also allowed us to enable comments on reviews. If you liked or disliked what someone said about a dating site or service you now have the option to comment on that individual review.

We have also reduced the content on the review summary pages to include just the basic information for each review. Visitors will now need to click the review title or the "Read the full review" link to view the entire review, which includes the full rating, the positive, negative and bottom line bullet points, and the entire review text.

Stay tuned for more changes to come...

Here is a quick update for the 2009 Dating Sites Reviews Choice Awards. We are now busy with the write ups for each category of the Awards. First up this week will be the 2009 Dating Sites Reviews Choice Awards - Over All. Expect to see 2 or 3 Award articles released every week with the final being the Single's Choice Award, our top Award that is voted on by you.

We currently have 641 votes cast in our Single's Choice Award. To participate in the poll which will decide the best free and paid dating site in 2009, cast your vote now right here.

Related Story: 2009 Dating Sites Reviews Choice Awards

Update: Our first Award is in! Check out Awards Topic for more details.