Looks like Channel 4 has a little duplication problem at the moment on their IP address http://83.98.28.10/. It’s resulting in double listing with the domain and the IP ranking for some queries which we know Google doesn’t like.

In total around 8,000 pages of 6,390,000 pages of Channel 4′s site have this problem which I’m sure isn’t having a massive negative effect in the grand scheme of things.

All that’s needed is a 301 re-direct from the IP address to the domain. On apache servers this can be done with something along the lines of

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} =999.999.999.999
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

It’s great to see in the past two weeks channel four have updated their catch up service from using windows DRM to using flash. Which means it now works on my mac which is great. Channel four being the nice fellows that they are even have a intro video saying sorry for the on demand service being delayed for mac users.

All I need now is Chrome, this year maybe?