If you are hosting your website on a Cloud or dedicated server, then you will be given a dedicated IP by the hosting provider.

This means your website is accessible through domain and IP, both of which could cause duplicate content if the search engine indexes both URL and IP. Duplicate content is not good for SEO, and this is something you should fix it immediately if found.

In this article, I will talk about how to test and fix IP canonical problems in Nginx and Apache webserver.

Test IP Canonicalization

You can either access your IP address manually to check if it’s getting redirected or use the following online tools to test.

Fix IP Canonical issue in Nginx

  • Login to your Nginx server.
  • Take a backup of nginx.conf file
  • Create a new server block like below
server { 
server_name 45.55.20.xx; 
return 301 http://yourdomain.com; 
}
  • Very obvious, you have to change the IP and domain name with yours.
  • Restart Nginx, and you are all good now.

Fix IP Canonical issue in Apache

  • Login to your Apache server
  • Take a backup of httpd.conf file
  • Ensure mod_rewrite is enabled
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
  • Add following Rewrite rule
RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^128.199.100.xxx 
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Make sure you change 128.199.100.xxx to your actual IP.