Google drops SiteGround-hosted sites

Last week saw sites hosted on SiteGround drop out of Google, resulting in these websites getting less traffic from search engines.

The hosting provider confirmed that there was a significant issue affecting its customers, which caused Google to stop crawling many sites hosted on its platform.

The issue was first identified when Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool was unable to crawl sites on SiteGround hosting. The following screen was shown:

On Wednesday, an update from SiteGround was released to say that the issue wasn’t caused by its services and said that it would continue to work with Google to troubleshoot the issue.

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 (@SiteGround) November 10, 2021

AWS and Google issue

SiteGround released a new update on Thursday, stating it had identified that the issue was a problem between AWS Global Accelerator and Google.

What is AWS?

AWS is an acronym standing for Amazon Web Services, which is a cloud computing platform offered by Amazon. The AWS Global Accelerator is used to improve the performance of your site, and it makes sure that it doesn’t go down.

On Friday, SiteGround announced that the issue had been fixed and that normal service should resume, meaning websites should be crawled again.

If your website is hosted on SiteGround, you may notice that some of your newest content has not yet been indexed by Google, and this issue will be the reason. Google should now be crawling your site however, and your pages should start indexing soon.

At Engage Web, we offer web hosting services to businesses that want reliable website hosting. We also offer search engine optimisation (SEO) services to those who want to improve their online presence through search engines. To find out more and to discuss your requirements, give us a call and chat with our friendly team.

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Jonathon Roberts

Jonathon lives and breathes marketing, boasting a degree in Business Management and Marketing Management and a diverse list of experiences both professional and voluntary. Having grown up in the thick of the digital and social media age, he has been quick to dive into online marketing and search engine optimisation in his career and spare time, spanning such fields as academics, local business and sport.

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