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Google Drops Sites Hosted On SiteGround

SiteGround hosted sites dropping out of Google since Monday. Possibly an issue with DNS

SiteGround

SiteGround has confirmed a serious issue that has caused Google to stop crawling many sites hosted there since Monday. Publishers are panicking as web pages and ecommerce store products drop out of Google.

SiteGround has posted various updates to the problem but it is still unclear what exactly is causing the issue. That in turn is causing more concern with some publishers to tweet that they are done and moving away to other web hosts.

UPDATED:

SiteGround Hosting Outage Over – Site Recoveries Continue
SiteGround announced the outage is over. Amazon’s Global Accelerator cited as cause. Sites begin recovering in Google Search

Problem Apparently Started On Monday

The problem at SiteGround began on Monday when publishers noticed Google had stopped crawling their sites.

SiteGround Initially Denies Problem at Their End

SiteGround initially tweeted on Wednesday that they could not identify any problems on their end.

SiteGround responded on Twitter:

“We’ve received reports that a number of Google bot networks cannot crawl some websites using our DNS service.

After thoroughly audit of our DNS, we can confirm there is no blocking on our end that prevents such crawling, nor we see any logs suggesting an issue with our systems.”

SiteGround “Escalates” Issue to Google

SiteGround next punted the issue over to Google, apparently assuming the problem was there and that Google could fix it.

SiteGround posted:

“We have escalated the issue to Google and we are working to troubleshoot and identify the cause of the problem. We will keep you updated once there’s more information or the problem is fixed.”

SiteGround Denies Problem at Their End

SiteGround followed up by distancing themselves from the problem with a subsequent tweet to essentially say they can’t fix it because nothing on their end is broken.

SiteGround tweeted

“Issues originating outside of our environment are quite difficult to predict, but we completely understand the caused inconvenience. We will update our official post with more information, once available:”

The issue was not widespread and did not affect other web hosts. It was just happening to SiteGround, which could indicate an issue specific to SiteGround, even though it might not be within SiteGround systems themselves.

SiteGround Passes Ball to AWS and Google

Eventually SiteGround seemed to identify a problem on Thursday morning, tweeting

“Update on the issue reported by some users regarding Google bots unable to crawl their sites:
We traced it down to a network issue between AWS Global Accelerator service and Google. We’re collaborating with engineers from both teams to fix it. We appreciate your patience!”

One customer tweeted that she felt that SiteGround may not have identified the problem and posted a screenshot of an email she received:

SiteGround Customers Are Beyond Losing Patience

Understandably, SiteGround customers are long past losing patience with many tweeting their state of horror, shock and despair:

Related: 22 Possible Reasons Why Your Site Traffic Dropped

Solution to Problem?

A SiteGround customer seemed to confirm that the issue is related to the SiteGround DNS and that moving their website DNS to an external DNS fixed their problem:

At the time of this writing the problem is still ongoing.

Category News SEO
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SEJ STAFF Roger Montti Owner - Martinibuster.com at Martinibuster.com

I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO and have kept on  top of the evolution of search every step ...

Google Drops Sites Hosted On SiteGround

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