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Did Google PR Just Take a Dive in the Shitter?! P2L a PR 4!

Did Google PR Just Take a Dive in the Shitter?! P2L a PR 4!

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Wow… Google’s new update the last couple of weeks has certainly been the most retarded thing I have ever witnessed come out of this company. What did they just do?! Almost every major site I know about has just had their site’s Page Rank reduced to ashes! As of right now, Pixel2life.com has just went from a 6 to a 4! This means that P2L has a lower PR than my blog, and any of my hobby sites. Are these guys out of their minds?? Check out my PR status on their various Google DCs:

PR Update

This was generated at livepr.raketforskning.com

Now I’ve been reading all kinds of topics and articles on this and I can honestly say that the webmaster community in general is in complete shock over this, not to mentioned completely baffled. We’ve been seeing word that sites with heavy paid links have been penalized, but that’s a load of crapola… Of the 3 main tutorial portals out there, I am the only one that lost PR and the other 2 all have link exchanges and paid text links so I’m not buying that excuse for a minute. Then we have sites with absolutely NO text links of any kind that were hammered. 9Rules.com has been reduced to a PR 4 and these guys were a 7 or 8 at least!

Check out some of these articles for more information and comments on this utter bullsh*t:

First, you can read about what exactly PR is at smashingmagazine.com (The ironic part is that these guys went from a PR 7 to a 4!).

And now articles about this worthless update:

Sitepoint.com Here’s a snippet but go here to read the rest.

Boing Boing: Was 9, now 7.
Engadget: Was 7, now 5.
Forbes.com: Was 7, now 5.
New Scientist: Was 7, now 5.


There is a MASSIVE article with tons of updates and comments going at andybeard.eu (Give the page a bit to load, it hammered) Here’s a snippet but go here to read the rest.

Slapped By Google

For a company such as Google with a stock price based extensively on anticipated growth and public sentiment, it doesn’t take a huge swing in goodwill to have a dramatic effect on valuation. Google has just slapped their biggest fans.

After the very controversial hit many sites took just 2 weeks ago for various degrees of selling PageRank or linking to clients, you might have thought Google would take a breather, but Google it seems hadn’t even started its crackdown.

A number of sites have been hit yet again, including this one, but there is also a new element that has been introduced.

Here are some unusual penalties for trusted sources of good content

http://www.autoblog.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.engadget.com/ PR7 PR5
http://www.problogger.net/ PR6 PR4
http://www.copyblogger.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.joystiq.com/ PR6 PR4
http://www.tuaw.com/ PR6 PR4

A few search and money related sites as examples

http://www.searchengineguide.com PR7 PR4
http://www.searchenginejournal.com PR7 PR4
http://www.johnchow.com PR6 PR4
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/ PR6 PR3
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/ PR6 PR4
http://andybeard.eu PR5 PR3
Vlad PR4 PR2


Here’s more at andybeard.eu (Give the page a bit to load, it hammered) Here’s a snippet but go here to read the rest.

Real or Fake PageRank Update In Progress (round 3)

Courtney stopped by to let me know about what appears to be a real PageRank update that is in progress, if there can ever be a real update again.

Many of the blogs highlighted in the update just a couple of days ago seem to have reverted to their previous position.

Now for anyone who might be thinking otherwise, there are still some obvious penalties in place for a few sites, but it is less obvious for the more vocal networks.

Some sites and networks still have a penalty, as do some sites.

Some of those penalties seem to be a carry over from the first Google slap 2 weeks ago, and some seem to be much newer.

The changes could easily be written off as changes in total linkage compared to the remainder of the blogosphere, but it seems like Google have given a penalty to those they could get away with.


Domain Starting PR First PR Update Second PR Update Today’s PR
www.autoblog.com 6 6 4 4 or 6
www.engadget.com 7 7 5 5 or 7
www.problogger.net 6 6 4 6
www.copyblogger.com 6 6 4 6 or 7
www.joystiq.com 6 6 4 4 or 6
www.tuaw.com 6 6 4 4 or 6
www.searchengineguide.com 7 6 4 4 or 5
www.searchenginejournal.com 7 7 4 4 or 6
www.johnchow.com 6 5 4 4 or 5
www.quickonlinetips.com 6 6 3 3 or 5
www.seroundtable.com 7 7 4 4 or 6
weblogtoolscollection.com 6 6 4 4 or 6
andybeard.eu 5 4 3 3 4 or 5
www.blogherald.com 6 6 4 4 or 6
www.Forbes.com 7 7 5 4 5 or 6
www.sfgate.com 7 7 5 5 or 7
www.washingtonpost.com 7 7 5 5 or 7
www.technosailor.com 6 6 3 3 or 5
www.9rules.com 8 8 5 4 5 or 6
blog.nafurai.com 3 3 2 1 or 2
courtneytuttle.com 3 2 1 1 2 3 or 4
www.SunTimes.com 7 7 5 5 or 7
TheGadgetBlog.com 5 5 3 3 or 5
Space.com/ 7 7 5 5 7 or 8
OneMansBlog.com 6 6 4 5 4 or 6
entrepreneurs-journey.com 6 5 3 3 or 5

The following are site updates which were not hit by a penalty previously for comparison purposes
www.hobo-web.co.uk 7 7 7 5
www.doshdosh.com 4 4 4 6
www.searchengineland.com 7 7 7 7
www.seomoz.org/blog 5 5 5 6
www.connectedinternet.co.uk 6 6 6 3 or 5

More news and updates available from source Andy Beard – Niche Marketing


Is this off the hook or what?! So I guess the best we can too is get in the fetal position and rock back and forth mumbling how PR doesn’t affect traffic and hope it all looks better in the morning. Here’s more discussions you can check out:

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=507987

There’s a ton of forum discussions going on right now on Sitepoint… just hop on over to the Google topic area of the forums.

You can also find a bunch on Digitalpoint’s Google forum area located here.

And finally, check out this post on www.dailyblogtips.com

Special thanks to Donna for sharing all these links with me… I was actually ignoring this issue because so much has been going wrong for me lately that I just didn’t need a Google disaster, but looks like I have to deal with this shit storm now too… YAY! Best I can do is keep an eye on traffic and see what happens I guess. If you have some feedback or a comment, please click the comment button and use the form to share your thoughts.

It’s been longtime said that PR is “just a number” and has no bearing on your actual traffic, so I guess we’ll see a true test now. I noticed that we had this PR 4 going early last week, and so far, our traffic completely unaffected. Here’s a graph of our traffic for this month so far, and you can see last week was completely normal:

PR Update

So to be quite honest, I suppose your bragging rights are taken away, but as long as my trafic continues to be solid and unaffected, I couldn’t care a less what Google did with their PR. So time to make some wait-and-see pudding!

Best of luck to you other webmasters!

Dan

P2L Reviews the AMAZING photoFlow Flash Gallery Component!

P2L Reviews the AMAZING photoFlow Flash Gallery Component!

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Welcome to another Sponsored Pixel2life Studios review! Today we are going to look at an amazing new Flash Component by Flashloaded.com called photoFlow. I've seen a ton of generic Flash photo galleries and chances are you have as well, but nothing like this at all, in terms of simple good lucks, robust functionality and customizable options. You can use this component as a scrollable gallery or even as a slideshow presentation. Check out some of the features you've got with this:

  1. Easily update images using the Component Inspector, ActionScript or an XML file
  2. Adjustable flip speed, spacing between stacked images and image size
  3. Customizable perspective view and reflections
  4. Option to flip images as a slideshow
  5. Add links/hyperlinks to each image
  6. ActionScript events to perform an action when an image has loaded, is selected, etc…
  7. Images can be external or included in the library
  8. Mouse wheel image flipping (Windows only)
  9. Optionally display a name for each image
  10. Option to set the number of images to preload
  11. Option to automatically scale images to fit or to fill the defined size
  12. Zoom in on selected image or on all images on mouse over
  13. photoFlow can open on a pre-defined image
  14. Customizable background color and opacity
  15. Option to start flipping from left-to-right or right-to-left
  16. Supports sound effects for image flipping
  17. Built-in preloader
  18. Light weight (weighs only 18kb with the scrollbar)

You can read the complete feature list and descriptions HERE!

I spent about 30 minutes playing around with this in gallery mode, it's really quite appealing and easy to use. Many gallery type scripts tend to be clunky but photoFlow is actually FUN to use. You can flip around through the photos and zoom in, use the scroll wheel and play around. Be sure to check out the photoFlow product page for live demos that look like this:

This really is a complete turn-key gallery, and at 18kb including the scrollbar, you're not even putting a dent in the page load of your site. It even has a pre-loader built right in, so you don't even have to mess with that. In terms of requirements, you can edit this in Macromedia Flash 8 or Adobe Flash CS3 and it runs under Flash Player 8 or 9 utilizing ActionScript 2.0. Here's a look at the Component Inspector for photoFlow:

How's THAT for customizing options?

If you are looking for a complete and easy to use image gallery for your Flash projects, I HIGHLY recommend you check out Flashloaded's photoFlow. I should also mention that's not all these guys make either… scroll to the bottom of the product page and you'll find a HUGE list of other awesome Flash products they make at very affordable prices considering the HOURS of development time you'll save with these.

Enjoy!
Dan

New Tutorial on Cracked Text and Photos, New Splash for a Friend, Rescue Me and v5?

New Tutorial on Cracked Text and Photos, New Splash for a Friend, Rescue Me and v5?

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Hey guys! There’s been quite a bit of activity lately and I’ve been sort of dabbling in all kinds of spots… So here’s a quick round-up of what’s new, what I’ve been up to and all that jazz. First off, I want to show you a little splash page I made for a friend of mine. As some of you may know, I’m pretty heavy in to the Garage Kit community and one of my good friends and favorite artists in the community is Joe Dunaway, who is especially famous for his insanely awesome Predator model kit build-ups. Anyhow, I host a gallery page for him and he asked me to hook him up with a new front Splash page for him. Here’s what I came up with:

ModelZone Splash

You can check out the full thing at www.modelzone.com

I really liked the way this came out, and I really liked the way the ripple effect on the reflection turned out, making the logo look like it’s sitting in water. Call me bias, but I thought this turned out really cool. So then I was puttering around thinking of a new tutorial to write when I thought maybe folks would like to know how I made that cracked text effect and the rippled reflection. You can apply that cracked effect to anything actually.. text, objects, photos etc. So, I decided to divide this up in to a 2-part tutorial, starting with how to create cracked text and objects in Corel Photopaint.

Cracked Text Tutorial

This tutorial is once again published on the Pixel2life Publishing System, and I invite you to come check out my latest lesson HERE! This tutorial covers how to apply cracks and other textures to a variety of surfaces in a technique that is as easy as pie!

In a couple of weeks I’ll also be posting the second part that shows how I made the ripple reflection part, so stay tuned for that.

It’s also been pretty busy for me because Halloween is fast approaching and one of my new services on Predatorstuff.com is my costume sales. I’ve teamed up with Kre8-FX and the talented Pete Mander to create the ultimate Predator costume and this is our first Halloween round and it’s been MADNESS! We’re actually shipping out the first suits next week and I am REALLY stoked at showing off the final pics. Here’s a photo of the upper torso of an AvP Predator costume we released a couple of weeks ago:

Predator Costume

If you want to see more about these suits we’re doing, check out the post on www.predatorstuff.com.

And you thought I only did tutorials? HAR!

And on an entertainment note, is anyone else out there completely obsessed with how kick-ass Rescue Me is? I’ve been a Dennis Leary fan for years and his Fireman TV series is absolutely his best work and one of the best television series I have EVER seen.

Rescue me

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Rescue me is an edgy adult TV series about the lives of various FNDY firefighters post 9/11 and how badly their lives have turned since that tragic day. It’s EXTREMELY gritty and isn’t carried on regular stations, it’s only on speciality stations like Fox’s action showcase channel. There’s loads of swearing, sexual content and has quite often had me in tears from laughing so hard. The 4th season JUST wrapped up and you can find the first 3 series on DVD all over the place. I HIGHLY recommend you check out this show, it’s every bit as good as reviewers say it is. I personally think television SUCKS and 99% of TV shows are absolute garbage, especially reality shows and all that nonsense. There’s only a couple of series I enjoy, like Third Watch (sucks it’s over), Prison Break (although that’s starting to get tedious now), but Rescue Me is probably the best thing since MacGyver!

You can also check out their official website at www.fxnetwork.com for showtimes and details about the production and cast.

The other day some P2L community members were talking about various ideas to boost the forum participation up and one of them jokingly poked a jab saying maybe we should start talking about version 5 of P2L, even though we just released v4. Well, I didn’t say anything he’d be surprised how close he came to the mark, because I am indeed already mulling over ideas and concepts for the 5th version of the site. There’s nothing SOLID down yet, but one of the things we are looking at is the possibility of a complete redesign and leaving behind the look we’ve more or less carried around since v2. This would be one of the biggest things we’ve done on the site actually as a new layout can be a make-it-or-break-it move. I’ve already been working with Nick and 2 other professional design groups, which will remain unnamed for the time being, on some concept designs, but I haven’t decided on anything yet. I just figured that being the guy that has designed everything on the site for the last 4 years, maybe it’s time we had a fresh set of eyes look at a design and freshen things up completely.

So nothing concrete on this yet, but I thought I’d mention it here for the few of you that read my blog, let alone read enough of this post to make it to this point.

So that’s about it for me… very busy on all kinds of projects and trying to have some fun in between. Take care gang and we’ll see you next post!

Dan

Quick Digg on P2L, New Go Media Arsenal Goodies and the EEZY Sites for Free Vectors and MORE!

Quick Digg on P2L, New Go Media Arsenal Goodies and the EEZY Sites for Free Vectors and MORE!

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School season is nearly upon us, and for me that means I ease out of full-time dad mode and start getting back in to posting articles, working on my sites and in general, be around a lot more to annoy everyone that got used to me being so vaporish for the last 2 months. I just finished off this week’s P2L newsletter and sent that off (you can sign up for the newsletter on Pixel2life.com by using the sign up box on the right side of the site) and I have some goodies I wanted to share with my blog readers in case you didn’t catch the newsletter.

P2L Update:

First off, we’ve added a quick Digg icon to all tutorial records indexed at P2L for quick access to social bookmarking goodness on everyone’s favorite news portal. Ok, maybe not everyone’s but certainly me!

Digg update on P2L

Simply click on the Digg dude to add your digg to a tutorial, or if it hasn’t dugg yet, to add it to the Digg index. Just bear in mind you do need to have a Digg account for this to work (duh!). You’ll also notice some text right next to it saying “Share It!”. This is going to be a nifty popup style sharing box that will quickly allow you to bookmark tutorials on social networks on the fly with all your favorite sites. Adam will be working on this tomorrow so we might see this up and running by Sunday night if all goes well, just keep an eye on the news for the announcement. The new share box will allow you to post to Del.icio.us, Reddit, Technorati and more!

Go Media Arsenal Update:

Go Media’s Arsenal line of products has just been updated with 2 new packs for you designers out there!

Go Media's Arsenal Vector Pack 7

Go Media’s Arsenal Vector Pack 7 is out features 7 vector packs with 296 pieces of pure vector goodness. The set includes the following packs: Ornate, War, Stains, Hair, Scrolls, Stars & Hearts, and Horror. Check it all out HERE!

Go Media's Arsenal Watercolor Texture Pack

They also have a BADASS new water color texture pack added to their gorgeous texture series… you can check that out HERE!

I’ve done some work with these texture packs in Corel Photopaint and the results are absolutely astounding. The packs are very edgy with stylish graphics, not worthless images that are about as cool as a butterfly collar. Just look through them and see for youself.

Free Stuff from EEZY Sites!

What do www.vecteezy.com, www.brusheezy.com and www.fresheezy.com have in common? They all have the same owner, the same last 4 letters, and some KICK ASS free goods for graphic designers!

Vecteezy.com

They’ve got vectors, shapes, icons, bruches, WordPress and other CMS system themes and TONS more! I was actually shown these sites by a one of our advertisers today and I was blown away at the quality of this content that is 100% free. Go check them out for yourself and be sure to drop the webmaster a note and let him know how awesome his offerings are… this guy deserves a medal.

OK gang that’s it from me tonight, time to go post some more goodies on P2L! Giggidy Giggidy!

Dan