Google Update, Fishing and Hammertime Sneak Peek!

Google Update, Fishing and Hammertime Sneak Peek!

My deepest apologies for the complete lack of updates on my blog folks, but the hammertime development has simply stolen ALL my free time and I am working non-stop on this with Chaos and NG on a daily and nightly basis. In fact, I am just taking a break now from hammertime to post this update, then I’m back at it for a couple more hours tonight before bed.

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.

Next up, I recently had the pleasure of dusting off my fishing tackle after a 12+ year angler absence and took my 3 year old daughter for her first fishing trip! For those that don’t know, I am a stay at home dad when not working on P2L or web business in general, so Corina and I spend LOTS of time together and I thought she’d get a kick out of fishing. There’s a spot that’s about a 10 minute walk from my house that’s perfect for kids, so it’s easy to get out there for an hour or two before lunch and see if the fish are nibbling. She loved it and we’ve been out a few times to try our luck and she’s managed to haul out a couple of decent Bass, a 7 pound Pike (I had to help out with that one) and some Sunfish. Here’s her first catch that broke the 1 pound mark:

Corina Fishing

She was damn proud of that fish! It’s been tough to find time to be with my daughter with all this hammertime dev lately, but she sure loves the fishing time we squeeze in!

The 1 week countdown for hammertime has begun as we are now 7 days away from our August 1st release date (yeah, I’m shittin kittens at this point) and I am extremely excited and nervous to finally get this out the door. We’re now tearing through it all adding the finishing touches and looking for bugs both in terms of functionality and cross browser performance, so it’s a race against the clock for us now. Chaos and NG assure me that our Aug 1st deadline isn’t a problem, so I’m just trying to stay out of the road and not sound too dumb when I make a suggestion that is about as achievable as sending a Coke can to Mars.

Hey how about a sneak peek for you guys that bother to check out my blog? It isn’t much, but here’s a little snippet of what’s coming in a week:

Hammertime Sneak Peek

Now didn’t that make visiting my blog site completely worth it? Good, I thought so too! 🙂

That’s about it… I’d better get back before the programmers realize I’m gone. Hope everyone tunes in August 1st for our big release!

Dan

Google Update – The faceless email syndrome

Google Update – The faceless email syndrome

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

Google Drama Continues… What’s new for those following

Google Drama Continues… What’s new for those following

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

www.getuserbars.com – A place to find, host and share forum Userbars

www.getuserbars.com – A place to find, host and share forum Userbars

This is a fun little site I put together for users to find, host and share those fun little forum userbars that you see all over the net. I’m going to make a bunch of humorous ones over the next little bit as I get time, but feel free to submit some of your own design!

Get Userbars

Send me your comments as well… This is sort of a work in progress (Thanks to Tony for starting the coding and Neil for finishing it up for me) so I’ll probably play with the layout as I get time 🙂

Enjoy!
Dan