Why is my servers ip address showing up in Webmaster Tools?
-
In links to my site in Google Webmaster Tools I am showing over 28,000 links from an ip address. The ip address is the address that my server is hosted on. For example it shows 200.100.100.100/help, almost like there are two copies of my site, one under the domain name and one under the ip address. Is this bad? Or is it just showing up there and Google knows that it is the same since the ip and domain are from the same server?
-
Hmmm, this is a weird one. My guess is, since Google originally found those links (maybe before your site launched, but the pages were linked to and live through the IP address?), it keeps returning to them and finding them. In that case, not much you can do, but keep those canonicals on.
Canonicals really can save you from duplicate content problems: I've had clients with multiple versions of every page based on the path you take to a page, and canonicals have allowed them to rank well and avoid penalties entirely. As long as you're doing everything else right, hopefully this shouldn't be too much of an issue.
Sorry this ended up falling on you!
-
According to my latest links in Webmaster Tools the first time it happened was October 2012, which is before the site launch. It seems to have accelerated this year. It is a total of 16341 links but under linked pages it only says 27.
-
Hm, this could have, though. When did you first notice these backlinks from the IP address in GWT?
-
I am unsure to be honest. We had an organic traffic drop in 2012 the week of the penguin release. We launched a new site last year which killed organic so I am trying to improve our rankings. I can say confidently we have had nothing in Webmaster Tools, but maybe it has hurt traffic.
-
Well, from an SEO perspective, this hasn't lead to any penalties or reduced rankings, right?
-
Recently we switched to https so I started using self-referential rel="canonical" on all my pages. I can't figure this out, and nobody else can either. I am on all sorts of boards, forums, groups, and nobody has ever heard of this. I just don't get it.
-
Did you add canonicals, at least, to make sure that Google wouldn't find duplicate content? That's what I'd be most worried about, from an SEO perspective.
-
I never solved the problem. I made a new post to see if anything has changed. It seems strange that nobody else has ever had this problem. I looked all over Google and nothing. I just ran Screaming Frog and nothing showed up.
-
How is this going? Did you solve the problem?
One quick note: if you can't find a link to the IP address on your site (or, a link to a broken link or an old domain), run a Screaming Frog or Xenu crawl and look at all external links. There's probably a surprise footer link or something like that that's causing the problem, and it'd be easy to miss manually. But tools find all!
Good luck.
-
Yeah it's generally a DNS setup. If you're hosting with a company the best thing to do is open a ticket and get them to walk through it with you. Most providers will have their own admin panels.
-
I have looked and can't find anything in the site that goes from ip. I have looked in Webmaster Tools and it doesn't show any duplicate content. We are on a Windows server, think it would be pretty easy to redirect the ip to the domain?
-
There might be a link or something directing the crawlers to your site's IP address instead of the original domain. There is potential for getting flagged with duplicate content but I feel it's fairly unlikely. You do want to fix this though, it would hamper your backlink efforts. These steps will correct this issue.
1. Setup canonical tags on all your pages. This lets Google know that 1 url should be linked for this page whether they're on the IP or domain.
2. Set your host up so that anything that directs to the IP is automatically redirected to the domain. This can be done with your hosting company, or through .htaccess, or through PHP. I suggest you do it with the hosting company.
3. Check through your site and make sure no links point to the IP domain. If there are no links pointing to the IP, the crawler shouldn't follow.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How would you address these URLS
Hey Mozzers, long time no post. Just a quick one for you regarding URLS, this is an example of a url on a site https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/products/spacehoppers/special-spacehopper.html Many of these pages are getting flagged for having a url that is too long. The target of this page is "special spacehoppers". Should i be concerned with the url being to long given my keyword is at the end? Would this be a suitable idea? https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/p/spacehoppers/special.html Would changing products to p be worthwhile? It would remove length from nearly all urls but would require a site wide re-direct. 2)Would removing the "spacehoppers" bit from the url be worth it? Yes it would shorten the url but would also remove the exact keyword from the url which could be detrimental to rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
Question regarding geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools.
I understand that it's possible to target both domains/subdomains and subfolders to different geographical regions in GWT. However, I was wondering about the effect of targeting the domain to a single country, say the UK. Then targeting subfolders to other regions (say the US and France). e.g. www.domain.com -> UK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TranslateMediaLtd
www.domain.com/us -> US
www.domain.com/fr -> France etc Would it be better to leave the main domain without a geographical target but set geo-targeting for the subfolders? Or would it be best to set geo-targeting for both the domain and subfolders.0 -
How do yo get local SEO to show up on search results
I am looking at an example of search results that displays the image below. I wanted to have the local address to the right of my website. How do I have something like this? qGJ6EBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | herlamba0 -
Google Webmaster Tools > HTML Improvements > 301 Moved Permanently pages - how did they even get there?
Hello experts! I'm going through my Google Webmaster Tools > HTML Improvements looking for pages with duplicate meta descriptions/titles that I can fix. And I noticed there are about 60 pages odd looking page titles that have duplicate meta descriptions, which are also noted as: 301 Moved Permanently Moved Permanently The document has moved here. Apache Server at sports When I click on the link to see the page names, all of them are pages we never created. The pages are all sports blog related. Here are few examples: http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/justin-tuck-blog.html http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/unlimited-potential-project-blog.html http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/left-handed-baseball-glove-blog.html http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/adjustable-basketball-hoops-blog.html how did they get on our site? Is this some sort of malicious attack? Most of them are sports related blog looking names. I just don't know how these pages could have been created. 2) is this hurting us with Google?3) Can you tell when the page was created?Thanks ron xEtX3op.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Serving different content based on IP location
I have city centric website. For sake of simplicity, say I only have 2 cities -- City A and City B. Depending on a user's IP address, they will either get City A or City B. Users can change their location through javascript on pages. But there is no cross-linking between cities. By this, I mean that unless you can read or execute javascript, there is no way for you to get from city A to City B. My concern is this: googlebot comes to my site, and we serve them up City A. How does City B get discovered if Googlebot doesn't read javascript? We have an xml sitemap plus plenty of backlinks to City B. Is this sufficient? Should I provide a static link to City B (and vice versa) on the homepage for crawling purposes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChatterBlock0 -
How does Google Webmasters decide what order to show external links?
In "links to your site" how does Google Webmasters determine the order of the URLs? By influence? Quality?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Magic keywords in Google Webmaster Tools
Hi All, Recently moved a friend to a new WP back-end website as they were on Flash which is pretty, but not necessarily the best for SEO. http://francesphotography.com My question is that once Google finally indexed the site, I noticed in Google Webmaster tools that it found the most significant keyword to be: automatically On the following top pages: | tag/snow-boarding-photography/ |
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BoulderJoe
| tag/style-photography/ |
| tag/underwater-photography/ |
| tag/vacation-photography/ |
| tag/wedding-photography-beaver-creek/ |
| tag/wedding-photography-copper-mountain/ |
| tag/wedding-photography-denver/ |
| tag/wedding-photography/ |
| underwater-photography-scuba-diving-cozumel-mexico/ |
| wedding-photography/ | The goofy thing is I can find anywhere that "automatically" is used - perhaps it is coming from a plug-in or magically keyword beans that Google found? Any guidance is appreciated.0 -
Nofollow links in Google Webmaster
I've noticed nofollow links showing up in my Google Webmaster tools "links to your site" list. If they are nofollow why are they showing up here? Do nofollow links still count as a backlink and transfer PR and authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoCoGuru1