Sandbox pages returning with IP not domain name?

At least they are coming back but what to expect

[sid560]

Last Wed. my PR5 national site must have got sandboxed. Only the home page was showing in the serps. I haven't selp well.

I did remove 6 duplicate sitemaps (my competitor has over 1000) and made a reinclusion request.

Just now I notice one of my city pages showing in the serps with the IP number rather domain name. Right below that in a separate entry was my home page with the domain name.

Has anyone seen anything like this?

What would cause this and will the domain name start to replace the IP numbers at some point in time?

[sid560]

Last Wed. all my pages disappeared from google serps except the home page.

Now they are starting to reappear way down the serps but with the IP number rather than the domain name. The links on my pages also have the IP number in the internal links.

How to correct this. Anyone?

[tedster]

I have seen this only once -- when there were links using the IP address. Not a good thing. I contacted the site that was linking this way and, eventually, they removed the dumb links.

[tedster]

The links on my pages also have the IP number in the internal links.

Do you mean that Google's cache of your page is using the IP address, or that you actually use it in your links?

[sid560]

tedster, the indexed page with the IP, click the link to that page. Then on that page with the IP number rather than the domain, some of the links also have the IP number in the internal links. These are the links that just have the directory and page name (but not the domain name).

[sid560]

I just found two serps listings to the same page. One with the IPs number and one with the domain name.

Any idea how to stop this?

I have a dedicated managed server. Is there something they can do to have it always go to the domain name? Any ideas?

[tedster]

some of the links also have the IP number in the internal links.

Where are you seeing these internal links? Are they in the source code for your page? Or are they just in Google's cache of the page, but not in your source code? If you have mark-up on any page that uses the IP address, that can be the source of your problem.

If the page uses all relative links, then the IP addresses would carry through every linhk in the "click trail". You can probably do yourself a favor by placing a <base href=""> tag in the head of every page and being sure to use the full, absolute url for the page including the domain name.

[sid560]

tedster, that was problem and thinks for the solution. They were relative links in most cases. I am adding the suggested coding to the header and have done a reinclusion request to google asking them to remove their cache of the IP number pages (but not my domain pages).

Hopefully then this will remove a duplicate content filter penalty and get me back to normal.