Some of you might have noticed a few changes with how we handle comments on Blogstorm and I wanted to explain things in a bit more detail. I will discuss the features first and the reason behind the changes at the end of the post.

In short when you leave a comment we now allow you to add a link to your profiles on sites such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit & StumbleUpon as well as a link to your website.

The big change is that we now only allow registered users to leave links – if you don’t register you can still leave a comment but you can’t add a link. Read more >>

When Google carried out the brand update on Google.com in March we carried out a study to see where Britains most trusted brands ranked on Google. The idea being that if Google was boosting brands either on purpose or as a side effect of a change in the authority algorithm we would be able to see in the search results.

At the time we concluded that brands were ranking where we would expect based on normal SEO factors but in view of the recent Google.co.uk brand update I thought it would be interesting to see the changes. Read more >>

Back in March Google performed an update which effectively boosted the rankings of big brands in the search results. At the time I commented that the update hadn’t appeared in the UK – until this weekend.

The Google.co.uk results have been moving a lot in the last few weeks but without any real patterns (other than US results appearing for UK specific queries which is probably just an error). Today the results are full of authority websites which seem to be ranking higher than one might expect for competitive keywords. Read more >>

The New York Times is celebrating this week after they managed to survive their biggest ever onslaught of traffic – 9 million page views in two hours. Read more >>

Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox raises and interesting and controversial question – should passwords be masked in online forms?

Nielsen argues that usability suffers when passwords are just a series of bullets and that it causes sites to lose business due to customers struggling to log in. Read more >>

Two years ago this week John Chow stopped ranking on Google for his own name and according to Shoemoney he’s now gone “legit” by creating a cloaked redirect diverting Googlebot from johnchow.com to johnchow.ca.

Apparently the site will be “100% Google compliant” so it will be interesting to see if Google agrees with this. I seem to remember it wasn’t just the paid posts and link selling that Google objected to.

The problem with John’s strategy is that wherever a 301 redirect goes a penalty normally follows – you can’t just move to a new domain and expect Google to ignore the fact the previous domain had a penalty. There are a few tricks you can do to get penalties removed with 301’s but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

Looking at the rankings for keywords such as “john chow” it looks like the penalty has already moved across because the new site has dropped to the same position as the old one.

Keep an eye on this one.

Anybody who thought it was a good idea to register a .yu domain is going to be regretting that decision as nic.yu announces all these domains will be permanently deleted in September.

Pretty bad news for .yu domain owners.

Maintaining the .yu domain register and propagating information on .yu domains on the Internet will cease on 30 September 2009, regardless of the renewal date. On the very day, all .yu domains will stop functioning on the Internet!

Google has released some information suggesting webmasters go through all their links one by one and contact the webmaster to get the link updated. Google also suggests getting a 301 redirect in place now so that the domains trust can be fully passed by the end of September.

It’s an interesting case and should have been a good way for Google to show off the new Change of address feature in Webmaster Central but they seem to have missed that out of the blog post.

The FTC is apparently planning to monitor blogs for paid reviews under new regulations (pdf) that could come into force (in one form or another) this summer. Read more >>

Last week we started a Twitition asking Google Earth to update satellite images of Tehran which received 6084 signatures. Within 24 hours Google had done exactly what we asked for.

Many of you have been letting us know through Tweets, emails, blog posts, message boards, and even an online petition that you’re very interested in seeing recent satellite imagery of Tehran. Well, we’ve heard your requests and over the past few days have been working with our satellite imagery partner GeoEye to make this possible. We just received updated satellite imagery of Tehran, taken on Thursday the 18th at approximatly 11:18am local time.

The week before @ryanbarr started a Twitition asking AT&T to offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices. With almost 15,000 signatures it’s the most popular Twitition yet and was credited by several news sources in forcing AT&T to modify their pricing.

From MSNBC:

AT&T said today it is modifying its upgrade policy for the new iPhone after existing customers of the popular device protested the $200 price difference they would have to pay if they wanted the new iPhone 3Gs, due out Friday.

As of Wednesday morning, more than 14,000 people on the microblogging site Twitter had signed a “twitition,” — a Twitter petition — asking AT&T to “offer reasonable iPhone 3GS upgrade prices.”

The Inquirer stated:

US CARRIER AT&T has bowed to consumers over pricing of the Iphone 3GS thanks to a grass roots Twitter campaign. A similar effort aimed at O2 is gathering followers in the UK.

At the heart of the beef with the network operators is the astronomical initial cost of the 3GS handset and the distinct lack of an affordable upgrade path from its predecessor.

Initially AT&T had in mind to charge all muggles $399 for the new Iphoney, whether they’d bought an earlier version a few days ago or not. But Twitterer @Twititions gathered enough followers to pressure AT&T which has decided $199 is a fairer upgrade price.

The moral of this story is that if you want to get something done, start a Twitition about it.

On another note Twitition now uses Oauth which means you can sign petitions in a couple of clicks without handing over your password.