An IP address has been found ranking in Google, with a staggering 5 million pages indexed, as revealed by a site:http://XX.XXX.XXX.XXX search.
This phenomenon is particularly intriguing given the rarity of IP addresses ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) in recent years, says Bill Hartzer.
Further investigation uncovered that the IP address is associated with a .org domain, which itself has 52,000 pages indexed, but with content drastically different from its original non-profit organization topic.
This scenario exemplifies Google’s ongoing efforts to combat the misuse of expired domains for unrelated topics, such as affiliate sites.
The strategy employed here appears to be a clever workaround for domains penalized by the Helpful Content Update (HCU).
By getting Google to crawl and index the IP address instead of the domain, the site is able to rank well despite the domain’s penalty.
This raises questions about whether the site has built or utilized a private blog network (PBN) to acquire backlinks to the IP address, which could be a crucial factor in its current rankings.
The lack of backlink data for IP addresses in most tools complicates this analysis.
The possibility that Google still associates the IP address with the domain name, thereby crediting the IP address with the domain’s links, is an important consideration.
This could imply that the algorithmic penalty is applied only to the domain name, leaving the IP address unaffected.
This loophole, if confirmed, could provide a temporary solution for sites hit by HCU updates.
However, it is likely that Google will eventually address this exploit, especially if it gains widespread attention.
The next step in understanding this phenomenon would be to investigate whether manual actions are applied solely to domain names.
If a site with a manual action can bypass the penalty by using its IP address, it would have significant implications for SEO strategies.
The Twitter gang has responded:
This seems to be the same as just moving to another domain.
Next time the algo runs, it’ll just penalize that IP or domain.
It’s a different “address”.
If you get hit by a penalty or algo, you can always attach a new domain, or move to a new one – and Google will eat it and rank it – for a while.
Then you get hit again (and if it was an algo, you may get a penalty).
It’s no different – it’s just a different address type.
It’s one of the rare canonical/dupe issue sources too – if the site is the primary on the server, it may show for that IP – and get C/I/R as that IP (canonical links can save a lot of headaches).