Official Google answer: Will the new canonical tag help with issues where you, by accident (stupid editors linking to wrong addresses) have indexed sites by the IP address rather than hostname?

Question:

Will the new canonical tag help with issues where you, by accident (stupid editors linking to wrong addresses) have indexed sites by the IP address rather than hostname?

Google's Matt Cutts answers:

Summary of the answer:

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Question	Views
My SEO client is using shared hosting for one of their websites. When I checked other sites hosted on their server, I found some spammy websites. Will that affect ranking of my client's website?	341
What is the best way to serve different content according to user country IP (legal reasons)?	315
How do meta geo tags influence the search results?	515
In regards to the new canonicalization tag, does it make sense for large corporations to consider placing that tag on every page due to marketing tracking codes and large levels of duplicate URLs like faceted pages and load balancing servers?	396
What if there are external links to a URL that is not the canonical one?	297
What's your take on "addon domains"?	350
Could you confirm whether the geographic location of the web host has any significant ranking factors for organic SEO?	444
Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues?	276
We are a pretty big site. We are changing our hosting company in the next few weeks (same country). Should we be scared from an SEO perspective?	413
If we were to syndicate my written content (entire articles) to multiple domains then would we be able to use the imminent cross-domain <link rel="canonical" tag to confirm which site we would like to index for a given piece of content?	301

Question

Views

My SEO client is using shared hosting for one of their websites. When I checked other sites hosted on their server, I found some spammy websites. Will that affect ranking of my client's website?

341

What is the best way to serve different content according to user country IP (legal reasons)?

315

How do meta geo tags influence the search results?

515

In regards to the new canonicalization tag, does it make sense for large corporations to consider placing that tag on every page due to marketing tracking codes and large levels of duplicate URLs like faceted pages and load balancing servers?

396

What if there are external links to a URL that is not the canonical one?

297