The Google Nightmare - Errors or has P2L been Penalized?
July 5th, 2006
A few days ago I noticed that my revenue and clicks have plummeted on pixel2life.com and I started to panic. I open up awstats and sure enough, traffic is down an average of 5000 visitors a day since last Thursday. I do a bit more digging and find out that almost ALL of my Google traffic has come to a grinding halt. I’ve gone from 5000 visitors a day from Google to less than 300! Can we say “nightmare”!? I have been pounding away at Google’s various helpdesk contacts, and so far, no dice.
I have TONS of pages listed, but I did a search for www.pixel2life.com on google.com and I get the following:
“Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.pixel2life.com”
This can be seen at HERE.
If I search simply pixel2life the search results don’t even show pixel2life.com in the search results. I used to be the first result. Check it out HERE.
I have also completely dropped on all keyword searches that I normally placed high on.
So far, I have received absolutely nothing from Google on this, and calling their corporate office was completely useless because there is no phone support for free services. At this point, it looks like I’ve been penalized. I then run over to Sitepoint and the entire Google forum is FULL of the same or similar complaints like mine and apparently there is a technical glitch.
Either way, I’m kind of freaking out over this because I’m losing revenue and traffic big time. This had better get fixed soon or I’m in serious doo doo 
Dan
Good luck in dealing with google. Hopfully they will fix the problem soon.
Unfortunately so far, they have been completely useless. I just keep getting generic bogus emails back from them spewing the same nonsense over and over again. This is very frustrating.
Dan
Yep.. strangely enough it happened to Good-Tutorials aswell, but Zach isn’t as worried as you are
Just last night I looked around a bit, check it out:
Google:
http://www.google.com/search?q=adobe+photoshop+tutorials&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=good-tutorials&btnG=Search
Holy crap?
Yahoo:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=adobe+photoshop+tutorials
Are you sure it’s a glitch? Google might not like these tutorial sites..
Yes, Zach and I have been communicating with each other concerning this issue. We’re both quite concerned because this is a big hit to us. It’s also been all over sitepoint, so I don’t think it’s actually anything to do specifically with us… you’ll notice that tutorialized has not been affected at all, and they are pretty much the same thing as Zach and I are in terms of how our sites operate. I know Zach runs a clean site as do I, so being specifically penalized for black hat SEO stuff doesn’t make much sense to us.
It’s quite the mystery, that’s for sure… I’ve since been using Google Sitemaps, and the stuff that it’s showing me is also proving to me this is a technical screw up on google’s part too.
Dan
A glitch or doesn’t Google like your sort of sites? I really don’t know anything about SEO, but i did notice this and it interests me..
I honestly have no idea… what’s interesting is thata very similar site to P2L (tutorialized) does not appear to have any of these issues. I’m sure if I was specifically penalized in some way, so would they seeing as they are the same kind of site with similar structure and traffic/PR.
Dan
[...] Another update regarding the Google issue at pixel2life seeing as today marks 3 weeks since this started. If you’re just joining in the fun, Google has dropped the main P2L page from their listing for unknown reasons. There is speculation this is a glitch, but no one from Google is able to confirm it. You can read THIS POST to catch up on what I initially reported, then THIS POST as a followup with more details of what I had found so far. [...]
[...] First up in tonight’s post is a very happy but somewhat confused update on the Google incident (Post 1, Post 2, Post 3). We seem to be back in action! Last Tuesday I did my usual daily checks of the Google system, and suddenly our info and cache pages are working AND we are now coming back up in search results with terms we normally placed quite high on. So I’m very pleased with this recent turn of events, but at this point, I have no idea why were were removed in the first place, nor do I know how we were re-included in the index. I’m always one to say it’s the end result that matters, but this little lesson in search engine drama has me more than a little nervous because I didn’t learn anything from it other than perhaps Google is a tad twitchy. I’ll continue to search into why this happened, but as it stands, things seem to be returning to normal. [...]