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I was under the assumption that using a comment tag such as <!-- meta tags: focus on keywords kw1, kw2,kw3 --> is considered spam through search engines.
What is the truth? Or can you use a comment tag that is structured a certain way?
By the way, this is the best fourms board! I have learned a lot for everyone here, you guys have really helped me out a lot. Thanks!
agerhart you have mentioned "if you use the comment tag in proper form you should be okay... What type of comment tag would you get penalized for?
Would you suggest inserting the tags into pages since the se's don't penalize you?
*deep breath*
Comment tag games and other creative html have been a staple of advanced seo for years. You rarely hear it talked about because no one wants to fess up the secrets. As soon as a few people know, it's history in the next SE update. Some things that used to work in the past (no longer) - for historical purposes:
Out of order tags: </title>Hi There<title>
Dupe Titles: <title>Fun</title><title>Fun 2</title>
Broken tags: <head>title>This is a keyword</title</head><title>another keyword</title>
Multiline tags <
t
i
t
l
e
>fun keywords with strange results</title>
Keywords in tags<title now this is a keyword>happy title</title>
Style tags where they don't belong: <title>Keyword <b>fun</b></title>
Wild combos: <title><h1><i><b><font size=7>Keyword Title</font></b></i></h1></title>
Other tags that don't belong: <title><a href="mycoolhomepage.com">Keyword</a></title>
Wierd tags that impact the rest of the document by kicking the indexer into a different set of routines: <title><generator =...microsoft front page 3000>My Keywords</title>
Non existent keywords with weird associations: <tag content="my keyword</tag>
Other: <script type="keywords"> my keywords</script>
Tags display weird in browsers: <! this is a comment tag>Or is it?</b></comment> ->
Freaky content: Take just the text of your document and run it through a "reverser" and paste it back into the document. Then randomly sprinkle < and > through out it with no reason - results are freaky (if a tech looks at it, they think it is just a broken editor).
remember, this is <h1><b>only</i></h3> a historical document. None of this stuff still works ;-)
The purpose? There is so much junk html on the net that search engines have to deal with, that the indexers have to make assumptions. There are branches and subroutines within the indexers to deal with all kinds of junk. Using <i>creative</b> html, will often send the indexer down into some of those routines that can wrongly index your document.
At one time I had <!-- comment tags that repeated the description tag, which usually repeated the first two lines of text on the page -->
Over time these were removed for obvious reasons, but I accidentally removed only the first half of a comment tag from the header of this particular page and never notice this -- even when the page content changed.
Doing a search in Google today I came across this page's listing and google decided to use the half comment tag as the description, (which no longer matched the page text or description tag and is just an open ended statement in the header).
This page actually perform quite well considering the page itself is not really relevant nor targets keywords from this old, now broken comment tag.
Has anyone experimented with this lately?
What amazed me is the control (or maybe just a flux) that an open statement in the header could define a precise description in Google.