Comment tags

Could this be considered as spam

[cypher]

I've seen this on a lot of sites.

<!--They put there keywords here-->

Could this be considered as spam? If not, does it help getting a higher ranking?

[oilman]

Hello cypher - welcome to WMW.

There is definitly a risk of comment tags being seen as spam if they are abused. On the other hand comment tags are generally ignored by most (if not all) SEs these days.

[spiky]

It would be interesting to know where you've seen them ?

Are they showing just in one specific engine or directory, under a specific search phrase or key word??

[cypher]

I've seen them on both Altavista and Excite in top 10 positions.

[spiky]

It would be interesting to know where you've seen them ?

Are they showing just in one specific engine or directory, under a specific search phrase or key word??

[cypher]

I used different search phrases about search engines, promotion and submission on Excite and Altavista. Some of the 10-20 top pages contained comment tags. I didn't check all pages but about 2-4 of the top 20 pages used comment tags.

I thought that it would be OK to use comment tags if sites about those topics used them.

[msgraph]

There shouldn't be any penalty for using comment tags unless you over use the same keyword in the comment tag. If the search engines ignore the comment tags, which most of them do, then it won't make any difference what you place there since they won't even check for it.

A lot of companies out there that offer search engine promotion will throw every type of HTML tag they can into their page in hopes of it giving a helping hand. Comments, drop down lists, forms, etc. So much of it that they lose track of what they did that actually boosted the page.

[Brett_Tabke]

Can anyone name me a current engine that reads comment tags? (examples?)

[WebGuerrilla]

I don't think anyone still does. Although you still see it used alot. The most common one I come across is Heading tags enclosed in a comment tags. Something like:

<!-- <h1>keywords here</h1> -->

I think it is most likely ignored, but I know several SEO firms that still use it. I would be interested in hearing if anyone feels that placing html tags within a comment makes any engine index it.

[ihelpyou]

I would have to think if the engines can read that, they would surely see it as spam.

I also think the engines give slight penalties to pages that use comment tags and put keywords/phrases in them.

[Xoc]

I have two top 10 sites where I am using keywords in comments. I don't think it makes any difference and have considered getting rid of them, but I am loathe to change anything when I am getting a good listing.

[WebGuerrilla]

I think your situation is a classic case of "If it aint broke, don't fix it.":)

When you consider the fact that only a very small percentage of the pages in a particular index use comments for SEO purposes, I think it would be fairly obvious that you would probably end up doing more harm than good if you attempted to add a penalty.

Simply ignoring them eliminates the potential abuse without penalizing the sites that truly use comments for there intended purpose.