Dispelling the Myth of Using Comment Tags in SEO - The List

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Here are a few of the reasons why search engines could factor comment tags in rankings.

1. Misuse of the comment tag: Often, inserting a comment tag inside a font tag will cancel out the comment. It will get treated as any other text included in the font tags. This includes page elements and tags where the comment tag would be treated as anything other than invisible comment in the code.
   
   
   
2. Characters in comment tags: Character references are often used to represent signs on the page that would not normally display. Illegal characters such as "ÿþ" will also display comments incorrectly. To illustrate, consider this article and the examples of comment tags used throughout: In order for the publisher to properly display these comment tags, they had to use special characters to make the comment tags visible. Otherwise, these tags would be invisible to the user. To do so, the publisher would format the comment tags as such.
   
   
   <!-- this is a comment -->
   
   
   < means the sign for <
   
   > means the sign for >
   
   
   This would be picked up by search engines as normal visible text, but not as a comment in the code. Test this example out for yourself: do a search for your test phrase in the search engine that spiders your page. You will find that the search engine picks up this information.
   
   
   
3. Poorly formed comments: Comment tags that are not formatted correctly will not appear as comments. To illustrate here are some examples of a proper comment tag and poorly formatted one.
   
   
   Proper Comment Tag: <!-- proper comment tag -->
   
   
   Improper Comment Tag: <!---improper comment tag-> or <-- improper comment tag -->
   
   
   
4. Browsers: Some older versions of web browsers could inadvertently format comment tags incorrectly. Most often this is the case when you combine improperly coded comments on the page with an older browser that is unable to treat them as text. It can even crash your browser! While most people these days use browsers that are compatible to current HTML standards, there's a chance that readers may see something different than you intended.
   
   

   Next: In Conclusion >>
    
   

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