Art, Technology & People

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.

At this point, I can’t get anything but a generic copy/paste style email from Google… here is what I keep receiving:

Thank you for your reply. We strongly encourage you to review our Webmaster Guidelines at www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769. If you make changes to your site to comply with these guidelines, please let us know.

Regards,
The Google Team

The sad part of all this is that if someone from Google would take literally 5 minutes to look at my site’s status in their index and tell me if it’s been tagged for penalization or if this is simply a technical error, this would be solved, or I’d at least know what the problem is. As it stands, I have been contacting anyone I can and yet I am still groping in the dark on this.

I recently was referred to Matt Cutts as a possible avenue to getting some assistance, but this guy is probably so busy, it’s extremely unlikely (although I WISH) that I will hear from him. I left a comment on his latest blog post about what’s happening (there is ZERO contact info on his site) and I think I left him a voice-mail at work, so we’ll see what happens. I’m sure he can tell me what the heck is going on, or at least point me in the right direction, so I’m prayin! I’m also still sending emails to Google helpdesk in hopes someone gives me some hint of what’s happening.

The pisser is now we have idiots capitalizing on this issue. Open up google.com and search pixel2life… check out the second result. How’s that for bottom dwelling scum sucking idiocy? THESE people get listed on Google no problem, and here I am fighting to save this site and get back into the index.

As for Hammertime, NG is back from vacation and Chaos is back on Sunday, so we’re still going to push onwards and we’re hoping to launch soon… hopefully Google doesn’t decide to reject this product too.

I also just checked my stats and I have less traffic from Google so far this month than I would normally get in an afternoon. Ouchies.

That’s about it from here guys… now to go approve today’s tutorials!

Dan

For those of you following the fun with Google and the complete loss of traffic I’m getting at P2L (we’re down by over 6000 hits a day thanks to Google going apeshit on me), here’s an update. Plenty of people have been sending me their comments and help, so I thought I’d better post some additional details to save people from sending me suggestions that I’ve already tried or that are not really applicable.

First off, I installed a Google Sitemap for Pixel2life.com a few days ago (Thanks to Halopro who put this together for me) to see if that would help. The sitemap is coded in their preferred XML format and it’s been processed successfully by Google several times, so all is well. Unfortunately it has not helped at all in terms of resolving this issue so far, but it did give me some very interesting information.

I found this under my crawl stats in my Google Sitemap control panel:

Your page with the highest PageRank
Jul http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/Swift_3D/All/?tut=19
Jun http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/Swift_3D/All/?tut=19
May http://www.pixel2life.com/

That’s completely impossible! There’s no way a random page on the site has a higher PR than the homepage! Not only that, but if I manually check the Google PR scores for these 2 pages, http://www.pixel2life.com/

is a PR6 and that Swift page is a PR2. So clearly something is totally buggered.

It also has this little tidbit under Index stats:

site: Indexed pages in your site site:www.pixel2life.com
allinurl: Pages that refer to your site’s URL allinurl:www.pixel2life.com
link: Pages that link to your site link:www.pixel2life.com
cache: The current cache of your site cache:www.pixel2life.com
info: Information we have about your site info:www.pixel2life.com
related: Pages that are similar to your site related:www.pixel2life.com

Notice that both the info and cache links don’t work? How is that possible is the “site:” link that shows links from Pixel2life show 22,700 indexed pages?! It’s because for some reason, the main page of Pixel2life is simply not in their index, and no matter what I do, it refuses to re-index.

So theres some very weird stuff going on and it just doesn’t look like a specific ban or penalization as much as it seems to be a glitch in their system. People on Sitepoint are also having similar problems AND they are reporting it happened exactly on the same day as it happened to me, which is 2 Thursdays ago.

So that’s some food for thought for anyone else trying to figure this one out lol!

Thanks for everyone’s support on this… this is stressing the crap out of me.

Dan

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