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The thing they all had in common was that apart from the usual title, descr and keywords, they also have a bunch of comments between the <head> tags.... a few of them also whip in some comments above the <body> tag. Needless to say the comments are crammed with keyword rich comments/text and are often just a repeat of the descr and keywords... several repeats to be precise.
My immediate reaction was that this was nonsense, and anyway, it is common knowledge that search engines do not include comments as part of the site content. Right?
Well, I'm beginning to have some doubts on this. Sites lower down the rankings have similar PR and better linking totals but the commented sites are killing them.
Coincidence or is Google susceptible to these tactics.
Well, I'm beginning to have some doubts on this. Sites lower down the rankings have similar PR and better linking totals but the commented sites are killing them.
As important than comparing their PR would be to look at how they compare in other elements that are known to effect ranking. Are the keywords you see in the comment tags also in the titles, in heading tags, in anchor tags (both on the site and on those incoming links), etc.?
What often happens with what looks like this kind of evidence is that one ends up comparing sites on which no effective optimization has been done with sites that have been well-optimized plus have some irrelevant differences from the unoptimized site. And someone who has bothered to put keywords in comment tags probably has also placed them everywhere else where they might help, and taken other steps to improve rankings on those keywords.
All of which are in the title and keywords the site had.
Now of course I want to add them as well, but I always thought this was some form of spam, as after all they are completely pointless.
BTW the above was just between the <head> and <title>
Those tags are having no influence with Google. I think Ink might be one of the last few who look at comments.
Comments are to be used for markup only. There is no value in the SEO scheme of things. Its an old school spam tactic that may have worked back in the days with a few SE's. I've seen comments tags that were paragraphs long. If they had any weight whatsoever, they would be below the keywords tag.
Brett has something posted here about this...
Search Engine Support Chart [searchengineworld.com]
