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?	580
What is the best way to serve different content according to user country IP (legal reasons)?	436
How do meta geo tags influence the search results?	720
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?	569
What if there are external links to a URL that is not the canonical one?	407
What's your take on "addon domains"?	479
Could you confirm whether the geographic location of the web host has any significant ranking factors for organic SEO?	568
Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues?	393
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?	530
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?	430

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?

580

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

436

How do meta geo tags influence the search results?

720

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?

569

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

407