Not update related: Using <!-- --> to stuff in keywords

Thought this is an old hat...

[bluemi]

Just wondering: I saw a site that is using the <!-- --> tags to stuff in some nice keywords into their main page, and it's doing VERY well in Google. I actually thought this was an old hat and would get you an almost immediate ban, but seems I was wrong. Everybody is talking about this oh so sophisticated Googlebot and lots of algo changes but wouldn't this be one of the easiest things to detect?

[twoline]

How do you know that's what's causing the high rank?

[rfgdxm1]

Actually, there is no possible justification for a ban here in the least. By definition, comment tags are for the page creator only, and are supposed to be ignored by all others. Any search engine that counted comment tags is broken, period.

[bluemi]

I don't know it but I thought it's simply too obvious for not getting you a ban. But might be that such comment tags are not crawled.

[WebMistress]

Gosh, I hope those <!-- --> don't get ya banned. I've got them everywhere...everytime I make a change, I keep the old stuff in <!-- --> until I decide if I want to keep the new change, depending on how it does in serps...so I have a lot of stuff in <!-- --> and maybe the site you saw also isn't doing that to stuff keywords...I always thought that was ignored by robots

[rfgdxm1]

Why should a properly working search engine ban a site for something that it ignores? Since it can't affect the page's ranking, it is irrelevant.

[deejay]

exactly what rfgdxm1 said (gawd I hope I got the nick right)

Comments are basically none of the search engine's business. Shouldn't penalise you for using them, and shouldn't give you an advantage either.

I'd look elsewhere for your ranking reason.

[bluemi]

Ok, guess I jumped to the wrong conclusion here. One reason for my question actually was that I saw a pretty big site disappear from the Google index about 10 days ago, and after careful checking I couldn't find even the slightest hint of anything forbidden on this site, except for some keyword stuffing into the comment tags...