I recently launched a new website. It started to rank well quickly (within the first three months). I was on the first page for all of my important keywords by the fourth month -- my niche is only moderately competitive. However, suddenly my website disappeared from Google SERPs. Poof. My site was nowhere to be seen for all of my important keywords. However, it still appears in a "site:" search, so I think it might be a temporary problem.
Recently, the site has begun to appear again for certain keyword searches, although traffic from Google is almost nothing now.
What is shocking is that when I search for one of my website's major keywords, it turns up our site on the 5th page with the URL like this:
http://12.34.56.78/section/category/title
instead of
http://www.example.com/section/category/title
This only happens for this one keyword search, as far as I can tell.
I have already taken steps to solve the problem.
See: .htaccess Redirect from IP Address to Domain? Is this possible? [webmasterworld.com]
What I want to know is:
1. Why did Google decide to display my website's static IP address instead of my domain name?
2. How did Google even find out that there was a website at that IP address? I have never linked to my site using its static IP address.
3. Could this be malicious? e.g. A competitor linking to my site's static IP in order to trigger duplicate content penalties?
Thanks for any input. :)
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:31 pm (utc) on June 2, 2008]
[edit reason] unlinked links [/edit]
