A domain available on two IPs?

[shaunm]

Hi All,

Say my website name is example.com and nnn.nnn.10.12 is the IP address of the website.

Should the domain be available when I type in http://nnn.nnn.10.12 in the address bar of a web browser?

Because, I'm running into a strange situation yet again.

1. http://nnn.nnn.10.12 - My domain is available on this IP exactly it is on example.com. And I could be able to navigate through the pages as I could do on example.com

2. http://nnn.nnn.11.12 - This IP also returns my website. But this one has the older version of the website. We have changed the look and feel of the website(only the homepage) couple of weeks before and the unchanged version is still available on this IP.

To make it more worse, site:nnn.nnn.10.12 returns no search results in Google whereas site:nnn.nnn.11.12 returns 4k pages.

An IP look on both shows our domain when I checked it with who.is

What makes this confusion? How to overcome the situation?

Thanks for all your help!

[edited by: aakk9999 at 11:32 am (utc) on Mar 4, 2014]
[edit reason] Obscured IP [/edit]

[phranque]

you should check your DNS configuration or at least confirm you are resolving to the proper IP address.

then you should change the server configuration on nnn.nnn.11.12 so that it returns a 503 Unavailable status code or is using something like HTTP Basic Authentication to hide it behind a login.

finally the server config on nnn.nnn.10.12 should have a hostname canonicalization redirect added.

[shaunm]

Thanks @phranque

Could you pleas help me to understand the followings?

1. When I type in my domain name in who.is to find out the IP address of my domain it shows as something like nn.nnn.12.20 - When I copy and paste this to a browser address bar my domain show up and when I navigate through the site the pages are available via this IP itself nn.nnn.12.20/product/features.aspx - The server should not return my domain for the exact IP address search right? How do I solve this?

2. My website is also available on some other variants of the above mentioned IP.
i . nn.nnn.12.20
ii . nn.nnn.13.20
iii. nn.nnn.14.20

What does this mean? Why it is available on different IPs?

3. Google shows different figures for the site: search
i . site:nn.nnn.12.20 - 0 pages.
ii . site:nn.nnn.13.20 - 3990 pages.
iii. site:nn.nnn.14.20 - 3420 pages.

Does that mean Google treats them as different domains and have the same pages available on its index but via different IPs? Meaning, I'm in danger of duplicate content issues?

4. When I tried webyield.net to see whether the IP resolves to the correct domain.
i . site:nn.nnn.12.20 - It resolves to abc.es - This ccTLD was used by us before targeting the Spain audience but this domain no longer available and redirects to abc.com/es/. But why does the main IP resolves to a long gone ccTLD?!?
ii . site:nn.nnn.13.20 - It resolves to the correct domain, say abc.com - Then why the IP address checkers don't show this as the main IP when I searched for my domain? (who.is)
iii. site:nn.nnn.14.20 - no reverse DNS for this IP


Thanks for all your help!

[phranque]

each IP is a different hostname and indexed separately as each subdomain is a different hostname and indexed separately and in fact http: vs https: protocols are indexed separately.
the way to resolve all these non-canonical urls in the index is to add a general hostname canonicalization redirect in your server configuration.
you should also specify the full canonical protocol and hostname in the Substitution string (or Location: header) of any other external redirects.