IP Canonicalization means if the domain is hosted on a Dedicated or Cloud Server or has a Dedicated IP, browsing with IP should be disabled. Possibly there is some positive SEO value as said by Woo Rank. We talked about Canonical URLs many years ago, it is indeed nothing new topic. But IP Canonicalization has more to do with server side configuration – although, we can do a 301 redirect to fix the issue.
IP Canonicalization : Why the Hell Server Backend Comes to Play?
At this point, it is important to read Why We Get Non-Authoritative Answer on NS Lookup. The extra money charged by Rackspace Managed service covers many small points, which honestly those WordPress Managed Hosting will never know. Recall what we said about Recursive DNS. For example; in case our website to setup our name server properly; we should setup the NS to :
1 2 | ns1.thecustomizewindows.com ns2.thecustomizewindows.com |
Doing a 301 redirection from IP to domain name is a cheaper fix. It is mandatory to rightly configure all the elements from backend in an ideal setup. Like we said in the article on Time to Live or TTL; we should run this command :
1 2 | ~ nslookup -type=A -debug google.com # replace google.com with your domain |
to check if everything is fine. If there is authoritative answer, there is practically no need of IP Canonicalization by any modern web crawler. Crawlers understand that the IP address is of a loadbalancer and frankly never index it. Here is a demonstration of odd behavior due to wrong setup by Hostgator (at 14 dollar what one can expect to get) :
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1 2 3 4 5 | https://dr.abhishekghosh.net/ # my real website is located at # http://dr.abhishekghosh.net/ # it is redirecting to # https://freehealthfoundation.org/ |
There are hundred of odd things that happen with Bluehost, Greenhost, Hostgator, Meateater, RedHost and hundreds of such cPanel based hosting services. So practically, the IP Canonicalization is needed for the domain https://freehealthfoundation.org – you can see in you own eyes, the results are funny and misleading.
IP Canonicalization : Easy Cheat to Fix
Actually this cheat is not a great fix because it does not addresses many other deeper things which might not be right. So, this is the cheap cheat to add these on .htaccess file :
1 2 3 4 | RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] # change XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX # change www.yourdomain.com |
But, in case you have multiple servers and loadbalancer in front, what you will do? there will be at least two IP address through which your website can be accessed, indeed; on Cloud based setup, it is actually more than 4 dedicated IP addresses!
In these case, only the loadbalancer’s IP should be included in .htacess rule like written above, other IP should point to homepage as 301 redirect from Apache configuration file. Actually, leaving the IP address accessible for some time gives some back links too.
