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

[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!