SiteGround Hosted Sites Begin To Return To Google Search After DNS Crawling Bug

SEO

By Chris Barnhart On Nov 15, 2021

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Sites hosted on SiteGround last week found themselves not being crawled by Googlebot, Google’s crawler. The issue seemed to have been an DNS issue between the provider’s partners (AWS) and Google according to the hosting company. The DNS issue was resolved after a few days but with DNS, things take time to update and now sites are starting to be crawled again.

As I reported at Search Engine Land last week, Matt Tutt was one of the first to notice this issue – where it started up on Monday, November 8th. SiteGround said they fixed the issue on Friday, November 12th.

Here are the tweets from SiteGround:

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 (@SiteGround) November 10, 2021

Status Update: We are glad to inform you that we have implemented a fix for the Google bot crawling issue experienced by some sites. Websites are already being crawled successfully. Please allow a few hours for the DNS changes to take effect. Thank you for your patience!

— SiteGround (@SiteGround) November 12, 2021

But was it fully fixed?

Why’s that – am I missing something? They just said they’d traced it down to that specific issue, no fix made. I just tested one of my sites and got the below response. pic.twitter.com/Mh42Eci1QC

— Matt Tutt (@MattTutt1) November 12, 2021

There were more complaints after the 12th and then SiteGround said they applied additional fixes on the 13th:

We have applied a fix last night and sites are gradually being re-crawled. As for the CPU inquiry, please DM us your domain so we can investigate and advise further: https://t.co/zMYnoTzgn7

— SiteGround (@SiteGround) November 13, 2021

It seems since the 13th, SiteGround customers are more silent about the issue, which may mean the issue is now resolved?

The ongoing Google Webmaster Help thread where Caio Barros from Google has been helping provide updates to those impacted, seems to have quieted down as well. It is an interesting thread to scan through, if you want to see it.

John Mueller of Google also provided some information on how Google deals with these DNS issues, in short – once the issue is resolved, things should go back to normal over time.

First off, this happens every now and then, it can happen to us, it has happened to other big services ( https://t.co/NjQeVR0Hrr ). Short outages sometimes go unnoticed, since DNS can be cached.

— ???? John ???? (@JohnMu) November 12, 2021

Googlebot generally does DNS lookups on the same servers, so our newly published list of IP addresses can help with checking & allow-listing. You can test using the mobile-friendly testing tool & URL inspection in Search Console.https://t.co/32pLcCkiXz