Comment by baxtr
5 years ago
> Proactively claim ownership of all your production domains in Google Search Console.
That's one of the first things you should do, when registering a domain and setting up a website. It takes about 2 minutes. So I wonder a bit why a business of this size would learn doing this through such a crisis.
This is sad. When you open a business in the real world, sure you have to tell the authorities about it (because it's the law!). When you open a digital business, you have to tell Google (via Google Search Console) about it... But Google is not the law, not even an authority; it just happens that Google owns google.com and Chrome and that makes Google the de facto Godfather of the internet: if you don't comply, your business is practically dead. Again, sad.
Author here. The impacted domain was a Cloudfront CDN subdomain with random characters in it, not company.com (thankfully!). I doubt anyone signs up for Search Console on that type of domain that they don't even really own.