IP Address Appearing in Google SERPs

[FTFlash]

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]

[tedster]

Google got the IP address version of the url from somewhere. I once had a major newspaper link using the IP address.

You may never know where Google picked up the ip address, but you've fixed the problem and all should be well soon. sure, it could have been malicious - I find that unlikely, but unless you get lucky finding a backlink, you may never know.

[FTFlash]

I've tried to find the offending backlink using a "link:" search, however Google finds no backlinks.

Can you perform a backlink check on an IP address?

Is link:http://12.34.56.78/ a valid Google search query?

[WiseWebDude]

3. Could this be malicious? e.g. A competitor linking to my site's static IP in order to trigger duplicate content penalties?

Two words; Hell Yea.

Make sure your site is protected from all those problems such as www and non-www as well as there are a LOT of shady people on the internet that will not hesitate to do this if they find they can. Could have been an honest mistake from somewhere, but watch your back to be sure, LOL. GL.

[bwnbwn]

I have seen it happen through the website propagation of DNS as well when the site is launched it it really under the ip address till it propagates through the DNS servers and can be indexed by Google especially dynamic sites were the ../ is used, and through linking to the ip address that was left unprotected.
Being a new site I feel more it may been an accident through no intent on any party and the fix will take care of the issue.

New sites tend to pop up really fast right now and then poof gone.

Fun to be at the top isn't it now ya gotta prove the sites worthy to be there time to go to work. (:>

[FTFlash]

Fun to be at the top isn't it now ya gotta prove the sites worthy to be there time to go to work. (:>

So true.

Thanks for the help guys.