gfixler, a Reddit user discovered a hack/vulnerability on the Sears e commerce web site and he was able to create an item called:

Grills to cook babies and more > Body part roaster.

So gfixler being the joker I expect he is, posted this on Reddit on 20th August.  Sears ordered a retraction, says this:

We discovered earlier today that someone visiting our site had defaced a limited number of product pages. It’s important for our customers to know that we have no reason to believe that any of our customer or financial data were compromised.

We’ve already taken steps to prevent this from happening again. We sincerely apologize to any customers who may have seen this on our site.

Post gets unreasonably deleted. All hell breaks out on Reddit and Sears get the PR disaster hey deserve!

So my take on this is:

• if you own a site that can be hacked like this, hold your hands up
• thank the hacker publicly
• fix the problem
• invite other hackers to have a go, asking them to tell the developers about any bugs on the site
• and repeat
• and get some love from unknowns who have the power to help or smash your brand online

I did a screen grab – there are 31 mentions of  ‘*uck Sears’…and so has been one of the bigger ‘memes’ online for the last day or so.

(Click on the image to see the page in high res.)

Sears PR Disaster!

Reddit Terminally Broken

In my work in Betfair, I have been involved in social media traffic generation. I.e. finding a great writer, getting them to do stuff users will find cool and interesting for 40 seconds. I have spent a lot of money on this and its been reasonably successful for us and the readers we have found over the last 8 months.

Without getting into too much detail here, we can’t do digg anymore because we have been banned…yes banned. And Reddit is now a no go zone.  And for no good reason. We stayed within the terms and conditions of their sites and we were out.

Recently a big wave of censorship  has kicked off on Reddit. To explain more, you should read a couple of very insightful posts on exactly whats going on.

Brent Csutoras

Unfortunately, that transparency and democracy didn’t last at Reddit, who has gone from being one of the most democratic sites, where users determined the quality of content shown on the front page, to a site that is heavily moderated, using a handful of people and algorithm layers to censor and remove content that in many cases has never even broken the Reddit TOS.

Search engine journal

As Brent Csutoras noted in a recent post, there have been a significant amount of people who have been leaving Digg and going to Reddit. The reason for these users moving to Reddit is because while Digg likes to say that they are all about their users, everyone knows that their moderators have a significant amount of control over the content that makes it to the front page (and their trend of having more control has continued to increase over time).
Unfortunately, it seems that my initial impression of Reddit may have been too good to be true.

Essentially they say that bad stuff is happening in Reddit and they explain how the power crazed loonies are infecting the site. I use strong language, since I’m very unhappy about this, both as a user and as a marketing person trying to give something to the community to get some prominence (A fair trade I think)

My point: These sites are fragile eco systems where small changes or vulnerabilities in the ‘system’ can distort the whole site. All it takes is a hard core of people who get a taste for power and wield it promiscuously to ruin a good thing. It happens in countries and governments and its happening here.

My assumptions: There isn’t much money around to run sites like Reddit since the onset of this recession. Ad revenue has tanked and so sites like these probably run in a loss, so they have to use fewer staff. This means less control, allowing for bad people to go off the rails. And on it goes.

The cost of building sites like these is relatively low, since there is now opensource software to quickly build a community,  so I expect the weight may well shift to community sites like sphinn.com which are more manageable in size and have a really passonate following who are very knowledgeable in their specialisation. A nice list of alternatives.

I know the only way you can fight this kind of corruption of quality, is to vote with your clicks and patronise other sites….but please, not Digg or Reddit.

I guess its Mixx for me!

Up the ante on linkbuilding

On linkbuilding know how, I will be doing well if I can get as good as this 19 year old: Colin Lahay. See his killer post on link building

I see it as thus:

• High level online PR
  • Actually contacting bloggers and online publications and tailoring ideas for them so they can recycle your ideas.
• Mid Level
  • Contacting sites in your keyphrase space.
• Low Level
  • Donkey work online link building, dropping links in comments, forums and doing reviews and so (this is the least pretty)

This is a very shortened version, in another post I’ll go through it in far more detail

And so I?  have been planning out the core strategy for this online PR campaign.Long term:

• Make sure the site im pr’ing for stays up the rankings despite various algo changes
• Dont get a penalty for agressive SEO’ing
• Assume Google for commercial reasons will get more and more agressive about any ‘manipulation’

Medium Term

• Make sure we have content worth linking to
• Refine the link placement process (the ratonale is simple: better links = more effency with link builders)
• Keep our link placement footprint ‘organic’

Short term

• Get the link building system up and running
• Tune up our link finding procedures
• Have a well optimised CMS to work off (were using movable type for this project)

Since Link building is essentially a sales process, ive been looking at sugarcrm as a way of organising the acquisition process. So we seperate the lnk finding process and then import this data into Sugar and manipulate the back end interface to de-clutter it and away we go !

I’ll keep you posted on how this goes over time !

anyway another post – another very useful and cool tool.

This one looks at the link structure of your site and picks out the strongest pages on the site in terms of number of links going to a given page. Its like a ‘light’ verision of Majestic’s link analysis tool.

Its here : linkresearchtools.com

I’ll be using this tomorrow to analyse a site im working on and redivert a bunch of links from some old pages and point them at more important content.

Of course google webmaster central gives you all this info in a far more detailed manner for your own site only and you have to varify your site before you get this data …

The ususal story is:

• Don’t put your links into irrelevant directories
• Don’t suddenly show up with 20,000 new links overnight
• Keep away from link farms
• Dont submit to 50,000 search engines
• Keep the link text relevant to the site

So if you do this, you will get demoted. Since link farms are cheap to link from, crap irrelevant sites with footer links are cheap to get links from and of course putting in the ‘wrong’ link text is easy, you can see how simple it is to do warfare on a given site.

Some interesting further reading from Forbes

Hmmm…. all a bit ugly really.