SiteGround has confirmed a serious issue that has caused Google to stop crawling many sites hosted there since Monday. Publishers panic as e-commerce store web pages and products disappear from Google.
SiteGround has released various updates to the issue, but it’s still unclear exactly what’s causing the issue. This in turn is causing more concern with some publishers who tweet that they are done and walk away to other web hosts.
Problem apparently started on Monday
The problem at SiteGround started on Monday when publishers noticed that Google had stopped crawling their sites.
“Very fast”? This problem has been going on since Monday. Small businesses and websites that rely on Google traffic have now lost four days of revenue because of Siteground. Do you think this is acceptable?
– Kim (@ichangedmyname) November 11, 2021
SiteGround initially denies the issue at their end
SiteGround initially tweeted on Wednesday that they couldn’t identify any issues on their end.
SiteGround replied on Twitter:
“We have received reports that a number of Google bot networks cannot crawl certain websites using our DNS service.
After a thorough audit of our DNS, we can confirm that there is no blockage on our side that prevents such crawling, and we see no logs suggesting an issue with our systems.
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SiteGround “escalates” the problem to Google
SiteGround then sent the problem back to Google, apparently assuming the problem was there and Google could fix it.
“We have reported the problem to Google and are working to resolve and identify the cause of the problem. We will keep you posted once we have more information or the issue is resolved.
SiteGround denies the problem at their end
SiteGround followed up by distancing themselves from the issue with a subsequent tweet to basically say that they can’t fix it because nothing on their end is broken.
SiteGround tweeted:
“Problems coming from outside our environment are quite difficult to predict, but we fully understand the inconvenience caused. We will update our official post with more information, once available: “
The problem was not generalized and did not affect other hosts. It was just happening to SiteGround, which could indicate a problem specific to SiteGround, although it might not be in the SiteGround systems themselves.
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SiteGround passes the ball to AWS and Google
Eventually, SiteGround appeared to identify a problem on Thursday morning, Tweeter:
“Update on the issue reported by some users with Google bots unable to crawl their sites:
We tracked it down to a network issue between the AWS Global Accelerator service and Google. We are working with engineers from both teams to fix it. We appreciate your patience! “
Update on the issue reported by some users with Google bots unable to crawl their sites:
We tracked it down to a network issue between the AWS Global Accelerator service and Google. We are working with engineers from both teams to fix it. We appreciate your patience!– SiteGround (@SiteGround) November 11, 2021
A customer tweeted that she thought SiteGround may not have identified the issue and posted a screenshot of an email she received:
I just got this response in an open ticket, which still gives the impression, in fact, that you don’t know the root of the problem. And you’re still waiting for news from Google, that’s what I was told two days ago. I have no confidence that this will be fixed any time soon. pic.twitter.com/dZJvP1VoaS
– Kim (@ichangedmyname) November 11, 2021
SiteGround customers are beyond the loss of patience
Naturally, SiteGround customers have long lost patience with many tweets about their state of horror, shock and despair:
I can understand that you may have problems, they are part of the job.
What I don’t understand is that as soon as you spot them, you aren’t alerting your customers and trying to hide them. That says a lot about the company’s philosophy.
Is very unethical and unhappy.
– Pantic (@ Pantic_14) November 11, 2021
This has been going on for 4 days and now 68% of our catalog has been deleted from Google Shopping because of it. Awful.
– Jon Bunce (@thejonbunce) November 11, 2021
This problem needs to be resolved urgently.
We spent two days trying to resolve this issue with Google as we weren’t aware of the issues that Siteground was experiencing. Google considers this to be policy violations by every website. We appreciate though, it may not be easy.– Jim’s F&M Garage (@jimsgarage_FM) November 11, 2021
How many hours will it take? The damage is happening as we speak.
– Dave Leusink (@daveleusink) November 11, 2021
Solution to the problem?
A SiteGround customer appeared to confirm that the issue is related to SiteGround’s DNS and moving their website’s DNS to an external DNS fixed their issue:
You should advise people to switch to an external DNS to troubleshoot issues if it is causing them massive business losses. I just fixed our connectivity issue in about 25 minutes by switching to Google DNS. If you had let us know 4 days ago we would not have lost more than £ 20,000!
– Jon Bunce (@thejonbunce) November 11, 2021
At the time of this writing, the problem is still ongoing.
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