If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll remember that yesterday I discovered that all the posts I made about my issues with my 2010 Chevy Equinox were removed from the Google search index sometime on Thursday.  To test why they were removed, I put a copy of the same post on a static page and waited for Google to index it.  The results are in – if you Google “My 2010 Equinox Story” my new static page comes up, but none of the other posts do.

So I’m baffled – how did my results get removed from Google?  It’s very odd that only 3 pages of an entire site get dropped from Google and when the same content is posted under another URL it shows up again.

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Update: 10:36 PM (4 minutes after I posted this article) – This post is already in Google’s index – so what happened to all my GM posts, and where did they go?

Something interesting happened to mgamble.ca over the past 24 hours in Google search results – all references to my posts about my 2010 Equinox have been removed, but every other page on my site is still in the google index.  So far only the “My 2010 Equinox Story“, “GM Is Reading my Blog“, and my “GM Responds” posts have been removed.  Now I’m not a conspiracy nut, but it’s a bit odd that only those 3 pages were removed from any Google search results, but the rest of the site remains.  Normally if Google drops search results, they drop the whole site, not specific links.

So I’m trying a little experiment.  I’ve updated my sitemap with a link to a static copy of “My 2010 Equinox Story” to see if it gets re-indexed by googlebot.  If it does, that implies that the other pages were somehow removed from Google.

I’ll post another update in the morning once Google reindexes my site and I have a chance to review the results.  All I can really say right now is that something really suspicious is going on.

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So after my last post about GM reading my blog, I got a call from GM Executive Response who informed me that I should take my vehicle back to my dealer and they would send a field engineer to look at the car and resolve my issues.  Since this is the 5th time in 5 weeks it’s been back to the dealership my confidence is low, but I’m going to give them this chance to make things right.

Now we play the waiting game – will this be the last time it has to go back?  I’m hoping that it is.

I’m still amazed at the power of the internet – yesterday I was getting nowhere with GM, but after making my story public I’m finally getting the traction I think this issue deserves.  But as a friend of mine pointed out, what are less technically savvy people supposed to do?  How do they get their voice heard and their issues resolved?  Personally I think GM needs to pay a bit more attention to customer service – 24 “business hours” for a response isn’t acceptable in this digital age of twitter, facebook, blogs, and real time information flow.  I will continue to update this blog as my saga progresses, so stay tuned to see how well the “new” GM handles my issue.

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Update – Nov 13th, 2009 – Just changed this post to remove the phone number.  GM has already contacted me, so there is no need to leave the number publicly displayed now.

It’s been less than 12 hours since I posted the tale of my 2010 Chevy Equinox, and it looks like someone at GM noticed – my server logs show people from GM have viewed my post and have been reading my site.  Hopefully this means I might start to get some traction on the issue.  I guess that’s the power of the internet & twitter

I realized that since there is no contact information anywhere on the site, there is no easy way for someone to contact me and discuss the issues, so if anyone from GM wishes to speak with me they can call me at <REMOVED> – I want to make it very easy for anyone from GM to contact me.  For what it’s worth, I’m still waiting a call back from my customer service rep.

The ball is in your court now GM – will you step up and make me a happy customer?

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Update Nov 10, 2009 – GM has responded to my post and I’ve posted an update about what’s going on now.

Before I begin, I’d like to start by saying that if it wasn’t for the issues below, I would be in love with the 2010 Equinox – it has all the features I could want (Bluetooth, MP3, OnStar, etc) and is a very comfortable ride.  That said, my experience so far has been trying to say the least.  For the past 4 weeks my car has been in the dealership 4 times, and today it looks like I’m going to have to take it back again – it’s misshifting, “bunny hopping” when going into park, and *almost* stalled twice.  It does this weird thing with the tachometer when at low speeds where it will go up/down/up/down/up/down then stall, but if I hit the gas it seems to prevent the stall.

I contacted GM last week and “Shelly” was assigned to my case.  I left a message for her today and am awaiting a call back before I take the car to the dealer to have the latest round of issues investigated.

I’ll be updating this more now as I think it’s time time to put some public pressure on GM to get this issue resolve the ongoing issues.  Click on the “more” link to see history of the issues so far that I sent to GM last week.

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