Does Google Index Commented Links?

Does Googlebot follow and index links that are within html comments?

[Gray_Fox]

I was wondering if the Googlebot (and other Search Engines bots) followed and indexed links that were commented out using <!--link-->.

Thanks for any input

[rainborick]

My experience over the past four years is that the major search engines completely ignore HTML comments. When I started, SEO lore held that there was a time that Comment SPAM was effective, but it seems obvious that is no longer true. On one of my ecommerce sites, I have a practice of commenting out some content when the item is out of stock and this has had no discernable ranking effects over the past 4 years. I even accidentally left in a large amount of product names and URLs relating to items I intended to add in the near future to a particular page, which could easily have been seen as a SPAM attempt if the search engines were paying any attention to it at all, and there hasn't been so much as a hiccup in that page's rankings. I'm including these references only to show why I have confidence in this opinion. The niche is only modestly competitive - to the point where I believe a misstep would matter, but the rankings aren't a major accomplishment.

[BigDave]

Google will not give any sort of credit to any links that are commented.

But you have to remember that gbot is URL hungry. There have been documented times of Googlebot trying to check just about anything that even remotely looked like an URL, whether it was in a comment, in text or in javascript. It would not pass any PR, and obviously would not have any anchor text credit, but they would check the URL for content.

I don't know if they are still doing it, but I would never count on them *not* doing it.