Can rel=”canonical” index my hostname and not my IP address?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: A smart question from Sweden, Anders asks, “Will the new canonical tag help with issues where you by accident (stupid editors linking to wrong addresses) you’ve indexed by IP address rather than hostname?” I have to double check, but that is the sort of thing that you’d like to be able to do. You’d like to take your IP address and put that over to the hostname. Now that I’m thinking aloud, we might consider the IP address different than the hostname, so we’ll have to confirm on that but I don’t think it would hurt to go ahead and have that. And ideally, that is the sort of thing where you don’t want you IP address to show up. You want your host, your domain name to show up instead. So, I think that would be a nice thing to do. I’m not sure whether we support it for IP addresses yet, but I’ll ask Yakam, the guy that wrote and did the heavy lifting on this code and see what happens.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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