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