SEO finding
The site also answers on its bare IP address
SEO Warning Severity: Low
Part of the audit Host and protocol variants. Finding id: seo.ipAddressServesSite.
What it costs you
A link or a scraper using the IP address gives search engines a second copy of every page. Owners usually find out when pages appear in results under the IP address.
What to do
Make requests without your host name redirect to the real address, or refuse them.
What it checks
- Site also loads by IP address
How to fix it
Add a catch-all server block in nginx
How to check: curl -sI http://<the IP address>/ shows status 301 to your address.
Do not serve the site for unknown host names
- Find which site the server shows when the request names no known host. On most servers it is the first one configured.
- Put a default site in front that redirects to your real address with status 301, or returns an error.
- We could not detect what serves the site, so we cannot give the exact setting.
How to check: curl -sI http://<the IP address>/ no longer returns status 200 with your page.
A real case
A site owner found 7,000 of his pages indexed by Google with the server's IP address as the URL, though he knew of no link pointing there. Another owner in the same thread reported that listings under his IP address had replaced his domain in the results.