When a webmaster was looking at his site data in Google Webmaster Tools, he noticed that one of the "Pages with external links" was linking to his IP address and not his site. He's pretty baffled about why that would be the case. He has no way of reconciling this as far as he's investigated, and it looks like it may not even be possible from what Tedster says.

This kind of thing can happen when some inept webmaster links to you using your ip address - I once had this happen with a link from a major newspaper! Ionly discovered the source through the server log referers - not through a link report from any search engine. Apparently Webmaster Tools got this crossed up in your case, however it happened that they found the ip address.

That sucks. A lot. It especially sucks if they decide to use your IP address when you're on shared hosting and the link never shows up to the reader. It's a poor user experience all around and nobody really benefits. Please consider to use a real URL and not an IP when you link to people. Thank you on behalf of all competent webmasters and users.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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