Why is my servers ip address showing up in Webmaster Tools?

[EcommerceSite]

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?

[Anti-Alex]

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.

[EcommerceSite]

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?

[Anti-Alex]

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.

[KristinaKledzik]

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.

[EcommerceSite]

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.

[KristinaKledzik]

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.

[EcommerceSite]

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.

[KristinaKledzik]

Well, from an SEO perspective, this hasn't lead to any penalties or reduced rankings, right?

[EcommerceSite]

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.

[KristinaKledzik]

Hm, this could have, though. When did you first notice these backlinks from the IP address in GWT?

[EcommerceSite]

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.

[KristinaKledzik]

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!