HTML Comments, Do comments help with SEO?

[Made In Sheffield]

I would never have thought about using comments for SEO but I've seen a site advising it and a site using it?

Does Google ignore comments (as it should?) or will they be taken into account?

Sorry if this has been mentioned before.

[Macguru]

I believe comment tags are better used for what it was intended for. If any major search engine does index them, I guess the indexer gives it such a low score it does not worth bothering about. Stuffing keywords in comments is a total loss of bandwith, IMHO.

[tbear]

Could it be that if they are used correctly (i.e. for what they are intended) a SE will give a thought to that?

[Macguru]

If I was some SE engineer, I would program the indexer to totally ignore whatever is between <!-- ... -->, because I am lazy. ;)

[martinibuster]

totally ignore whatever is between <!-- ... -->

Which is the intended purpose. Otherwise the search engine bots would be parsing the JavaScript code. Which they don't. It's ignored.

There's an article around here discussing how Google compresses content so that it can store massive amounts of data, stripped of non-esssentials.

The comment tag trick is a myth. I would advise you to disregard the web site that is telling you to stuff keywords, as well as any other way to "trick" the search engines. Just focus on creating indexable content. You'll come out miles ahead and avoid unfortunate penalties.

A site search (using your google toolbar) for the term "banned" is quite instructive.