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Why does a website have more referring IPs than referring domains?

Find out why a website can have more referring IPs than domains.

Helen avatar
Written by Helen
Updated this week

There are at least two reasons why there can be more Referring IPs than Referring Domains.

Reason #1

The same domain can have multiple IP addresses. Usually, this is done to spread the load. More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS

Reason #2

Let's suppose X is the domain for which there are only three backlinks from these pages:

 http://subdomain1.domain.com/index.html is located on the server with IP 1.1.1.1

 http://subdomain2.domain.com/index.html is located on the server with IP 2.2.2.2

 http://subdomain3.domain.com/index.html is located on the server with IP 3.3.3.3

It turns out that Domain X has only one referring domain (domain.com) but 3 referring IPs (1.1.1.1, 2.2.2.2, 3.3.3.3)

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