IP issue

[amar]

Hi Everyone,
I have discovered that my site has been indexed both under domain name and ip address. Exactly how this happened I'm not sure.

Can I use a robots.txt file to remove indexed pages by ip address? If not, will a 301 in my .htaccess file work? I don't know if it's possible to redirect for ip to domain name.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

-Amar

[incrediblehelp]

amar can you PM me the domain, IP and engine or post it here?

[varun8211]

have not heard sth like this before..
ur URL and IP addresses will indeed by of help. plz provide that.

its an interesting thing to intrigue on :)

[amar]

Hi Incredible help and Varun,

As a matter of confidentiality, right now I can not provide thr URL.

Thanks,
Amar

[incrediblehelp]

I guess this could be happening just like when someone parks multiple domains to one IP.

IP = 11.11.11.11 (whatever)
Domain A points to the IP above and is the primary domain you want to show in the SERPs
Domain B also points to the IP above, but is a secondary domain you don't want to show in the SERPs

If you and other established authority websites were to link to domain B, that one will show into the SERPs even if you did not want it to.

Here is my guess as to what is happening even though I personally feel it shouldn't be happening as the IP.

You need to ensure no one including yourself is linking to the IP (in the example above it would be considered domain B). By doing this it is forcing the search engine to crawl it and associate value to it over your domain name (domain A).

[sdrury]

I fully agree with Incrediblehelps' theory.

I understand that you do not wished to have the IP/DNS indexed by the SE's (how did you find this out anyway - random search?

As I see it you have two options:
1 - request (or adminster) a change of server - then resubmit the URL to the SE's. If the IP gets reindexed again - the integrity of the server of software may be in question.

2 - If the site has confidential content (refer to the companies security classification policy) it should either be hosted on a secure intranet (not extranet) or as some of the larger corporates do simply mask the address (you need to discuss this with the infrastructure/server manufacturers)

Just to put the cat amongst the pigeons there is a rumour that having a unique IP address can help with search engine ranking. A number of hosts don't give out unique IP addresses to save money, and assign the same IP to multiple domain names.
A good check point is to go to http://www.name-space.com/search and enter your URL in the nslookup field to get the IP. Then re-enter that IP in the browser. If another website or an error message appears youprobably share your IP address.

Steve.

[amar]

Hi Incredible help & Steve,

The site is having dedicated IP and hosted on dedicated server.

When i am checking the site in http://name-space.com/search/ , it was showing the following error.

Reverse lookup produced no results.
The IP number xx.xx.xxx.xxx
does not appear to be inverse-mapped to a domain name.

Will this be a reason. I had given exact paths with domain name in all the files and uploaded recently.

I am so sorry that I am unable to provide my domain name.

Would like to have more debate on this. This will be a wonderful case study.

Thanks,
Amar

[incrediblehelp]

Amar Ii am sorry but without knowing the domain and IP trouble shooting is limited.

[amar]

Hi Incrediblehelp,

Can I redirect the IP to the domain name. What should I do to over come this.

Thanks,
Amar

[incrediblehelp]

I dont think you can redirect the IP and to be honest the search eniges should display the domain as default and never the IP. Is the DNS set up correctly matching that IP to the domain?