IP address being indexed by Google in addition to canonical domain.
-
Our site's IP address is being indexed in addition to the canonical www.example.com domain.
As soon as it was flagged a 301 was implemented in the .htaccess file to redirect the IP address to the canonical.
Does this usually occur? Is it detrimental to SEO?
In my time in SEO I've never heard of this being an issue, or being part of a list of things to be checked. It sounds more like a server that wasn't configured correctly when hosting was set up?
It didn't seem to be affecting the site at all, but is it more common and I've just never heard of it?
Should it be something I'm usually looking for in future?Responses are greatly appreciated!
-
I agree with Cody but would like to ask if you can offer a specific example. It always is helpful to look at the exact result.
-
I have actually seen this before. And since this was my own testing server I'm quite sure that it's bad server management. (since i'm no wizkid at servers.) so maybe one should test it. But as to what exactly is causing it? I'm clueless sorry.
-
Gotta say I've never heard of this either, but I would say you're taking the correct course of action implementing a 301 to the correct URL. You may also want to throw a rel="canonical" tag on those pages if you haven't already - just for good measure.
That's certainly odd.
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
-
Do cross domain rel canonical and original source tags have to be the same?
I have placed content on a partner site using the same content that is on my site. I want the link juice from the site and the canonical tag points back to my site. However, they are also using the original source tag as they publish a lot of news. If they have the original source tag as the page on their site and the canonical as mine, is this killing the link juice from the canonical and putting me in jeopardy of a duplicate content penalty? Google has already started indexing the page on their site with the same content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SecuritiesCE0 -
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Strange Cross Domain Canonical Issue...
We have 2 identical ecommerce sites. Using 301 is not an option since both are major brands. We've been testing cross domain canonicals for about 2 dozen products, which were pretty successful. Our rankings generally increased. Then things got weird. For the most part, canonicaled pages appeared to have passed link juice since the rankings significantly improved on the other site. The clean URLs (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm) disappeared from the rankings, as they are supposed to, but some were replaced by urls with parameters that Google had indexed (apparently duplicate content). ex: (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm?clicksource?3diaftv). The parametered URLs have the correct canonical tags. In order to try and remove these from Google's index, we: 1. Had the pages fetched in GWT assuming that Google hadn't detected the canonical tage. 2. After we discovered a few hundred of these pages indexed on both sites, we built sitemaps of the offending pages and had the sitemaps fetched. If anyone has any other ideas, please share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Google Processing but Not Indexing XML Sitemap
Like it says above, Google is processing but not indexing our latest XML sitemap. I noticed this Monday afternoon - Indexed status was still Pending - and didn't think anything of it. But when it still said Pending on Tuesday, it seemed strange. I deleted and resubmitted our XML sitemap on Tuesday. It now shows that it was processed on Tuesday, but the Indexed status is still Pending. I've never seen this much of a lag, hence the concern. Our site IS indexed in Google - it shows up with a site:xxxx.com search with the same number of pages as it always has. The only thing I can see that triggered this is Sunday the site failed verification via Google, but we quickly fixed that and re-verified via WMT Monday morning. Anyone know what's going on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Google Site Extended Listing Not Indexed
I am trying to get the new Site map to be picked up by Google for the extended listing as its pulling from the old links and returning 404 errors. How can I get the site listing indexed quickly and have the extended listing get updated to point to the right places. This is the site - http://epaperflip.com/Default.aspx This is the search with the extended listing and some 404's - Broad Match search for "epaperflip"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Intergen0 -
Redirecting a Page from Domain A to Domain B
We have a page on Domain A, an established and well-ranking website, that would be more appropriate on Domain B, a site that we launched about two years ago. This page ranks well, pulls nice search traffic and has traffic from external links. We would like to move the page and its traffic from Domain A to Domain B using a 301 redirect. Have you ever done this or have you heard of how it has worked for someone else? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
I currently have a client that has multiple domains for multiple brands that share the same IP Address. Will link juice be passed along to the different sites when they link to one another or will it simply be considered internal linking?
I have 7 brands that are owned by the same company, each with their own domain. The brands work together to form products that are then sold to the consumer although there is not a e-commerce aspect to any of the sites. I am looking to create a modified link wheel between the sites, but didn't know if my efforts would pay off due to the same IP Address for all the sites. Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HughesDigital0 -
Help! Why did Google remove my images from their index?
I've been scratching my head over this one for a while now and I can't seem to figure it out. I own a website that is user-generated content. Users submit images to my sites of graphic resources (for designers) that they have created to share with our community. I've been noticing over the past few months that I'm getting completely dominated in Google Images. I used to get a ton of traffic from Google Images, but now I can't find my images anywhere. After diving into Analytics I found this: http://cl.ly/140L2d14040Q1R0W161e and realized sometime about a year ago my image traffic took a dive. We've gone back through all the change logs and can't find where we made any changes to the site structure that could have caused this. We are stumped. Does anyone know of any historical Google updates that could have caused this last year around the end of April 2010? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shawn810