Just an enthusiastic in-house site designer, or hand in cookie jar?

Interviewer pops a question.

[skibum]

There is a good interview on SEO here [webreference.com] Midway through, the interviewer pops a "surprise question"
>WR: You discourage spamdexing, but on your home page
(http:www.see-it-in-the-article.com) you use a commented H1. Does this work?

<added for example>
<H1> <!--web marketing search enigne positioning, search engine ranking............--></H1>
</added>

>FM: Sorry, no clever trick just an enthusiastic in-house site designer. We commented out headlines that looked unattractive. Really really unattractive. I will not pursue rankings at the
expense of our brand image no matter the cost.

I've seen it on more than just that site, and even thrown it in a few. Nobody would put that long a string of targeted keywords in H1 and then comment them out because it looks bad. That's something one might expect to find in a cloaked page or "creative" <noframes> tag. I never tested with and w/o, just threw them in. I assume it was there for a purpose.

1) Anybody ever do a test?

2) How does something like that on a high profile site pass muster when a human looks at it?

[legster]

Sounds to me like he is not being very honest. He should of just said he was experimenting. If I had text that was really really unattractive I would delete it, not comment it out.

However, I have seen a lot worse done. I really don't think it will effect his page any. Heading tag or not, it's still just a comment.

I like all the periods. If someone is searching for ..............., then this guy is who their looking for! :)