Art, Technology & People

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

Well, this is a new chapter in corporate idiocy as far as I’m concerned… I would LOVE to have a job where I look for kids on the net drawing pics of some famous corporate logo and then threaten to sue them.

Here’s the story.. a couple of weeks ago, a tutorial was submitted by rakkerdesign.nl on how to draw the famous Volkswagen logo at P2L. It was a great tutorial and the end result was pretty realistic.

Last week, I get this letter from the Corporate folks at VW:

Dear Sirs,

my name is Stefan Krilla. I work for Volkswagen AG section Corporate Identity/Design Wolfsburg/Germany. I was surfing through the internet, when I found a tutorial link about making the Volkswagen logo on your site.

The Volkswagen logo is a registered Trademark!!! No one is allowed to replicate it! Any offence against it will result in legal effects.

Therefore you have to delete the link “Make Volkswagen Logo – Learn an easy way to make the logo” from you list. The tutorial is submitted by “Rakker Design” in section “Drawing” (05-02-2006)

I also contacted the author and told him to delete this tutorial.

Thank you for your cooperation in this case.
Best regards.

Stefan Krilla

I wrote them back telling them I had no content whatsoever on our server pertaining to this tutorial and that they were barking up the wrong tree, not to mention I thought it was pretty sad they felt the need to go after this kid for drawing their logo, which is simply fan-art as far as I’m concerned. I hate people that rip off other people’s work and try to pass it off as their own, but this is NOT that kind of situation. I’m pretty sure we all know to whom that famous VW logo belongs to.

What’s next? They start contacting people that have VW cars in their personal photos? Maybe sue Auto-trader for all the stolen stock photos people use in their ads taken from the VW website.

Anyhow, I had zero intention of removing the link, but I unfortunately received an email from the owner of the tutorial informing me that the tutorial was taken down due to legal threats from VW and asked me to take it off the P2L listing. Too bad… was looking forward to some good ol’ e-confrontations with the corporate Goliath.

Anyhow, thought that was pretty lame of VW… what are your thoughts? I know copyright and trademarks are a touchy subject, but I think this was overkill. Imagine Microsoft started going after people drawing their logos? They would get annihilated in the media.

Dan

A humorous look at tutorial writing for folks that write tuts and submit them to tutorial portals for traffic. People get so offended when their tutorials are declined, so maybe they should give this a read and find out why.

read more | digg story

Nice article Jay!