Do Search Engine Spiders Read Commented Out Content?
-
Do Search Engine Spiders Read Commented Out Content?
Is commented out content detrimental?
-
If you include any links in your comments, Google may crawl them, although they won't pass any link juice. Google is pretty aggressive above spidering any links they find, including unlinked URLs on a page and URLs in javascript, so I wouldn't be surprised if they crawled links in comments as well.
-
I've never seen Google (or other engines) pay any attention to HTML comments. In fact, I've seen strong evidence that they are completely ignored. It only makes sense. People stick all kinds of things in comments for a wide variety of purposes. I can't imagine why a search engine would do anything else. And as far as Panda is concerned, Panda is aimed at the user's experience and since HTML comments are invisible to users, there's no reason they should have any effect.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Potential duplicate content issue?
We have a category on our website for PVC rolls to buy as standard 50m rolls (this includes 15 products in the category). We're also releasing PVC rolls to buy per metre (10m roll/25m roll etc...), again with 15 products, which we are adding as a separate category as it makes more sense for our customers and removes the risk of having too many options. Would using the same description be bad practice for SEO? The product is exactly the same just available in different roll sizes, but we definitely do not want to combine categories as it doesn't work for our customers. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | RayflexGroup0 -
What to do with repetitive content
Hi, I recently took over a site from another SEO firm. They created lots of articles targeting the same terms. The articles aren't bad but I fear they could dilute the site's ranking power for a given term. I don't want to give away the specific industry, but let's say they have eight pages targeting the term "______ billing software." I'd rather focus their resources on ranking one page for that term. Does that make sense? And if so, how do I do that? The company has a writer that can see if any of the content is good enough to add to their primary ______ billing software page. Would you 301 redirect all these pages to the one you want to rank, or would you canonicalize them? Or am I way off base in my thinking?
On-Page Optimization | | rich.owings0 -
Content Mismatch
Hi, I've added my app to search console, and there are reported 480 content mismatch pages. How can I solve this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | Silviu0 -
Avoiding Duplicate Title Tags and Duplicate Content
Hi - I have a question on how to both avoid duplicate title tags and duplicate content AND still create a good user experience. I have a lot of SEO basics to do as the company has not done any SEO to this point. I work for a small cruise line. We have a page for each cruise. Each cruise is associated with a unique itinerary. However the ports of call are not necessarily unique to each itinerary. For each port on the itinerary there are also a set of excursions and if the port is the embark/disembark port, hotels that are associated. The availability of the excursions and hotels depends on the dates associated with the cruise. Today, we have two pages associated with each cruise for the excursions and hotels: mycruisecompany.com/cruise/name-of-cruise/port/excursion/?date=dateinport mycruisecompany.com/cruise/name-of-cruise/port/hotel/?date=dateinport When someone navigates to these pages, they can see a list of relevant content. From a user perspective the list I see is only associated with the relevant date (which is determined by a set of query parameters). Unfortunately, there are situations where the same content is on multiple pages. For instance the exact same set of hotels or excursions might be available for two different cruises or on multiple dates of the same cruise. This is causing a couple of different challenges. For instance, with regard to title tags, we have <title>Hotels in Rome</title> multiple times. I know that isn't good. If I tried to just have a hub page with hotels and a hub page with excursions available from each cruise and then a page for each hotel and excursion, each with a unique title tag, then the challenge is that I don't know how to not make the customer have to work through whether the hotel they are looking for is actually available on the dates in question. So while I can guarantee unique content/title tags, I end up asking the user to think too much. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Marston_Gould1 -
Mobile website content
What is the point of optimizing (on-page SEO) a parallel mobile website if the mobile search results are taken from the general (desktop) index?
On-Page Optimization | | echo10 -
Can internal duplicate content cause issues?
Hello all mozzers - has anyone used nitrosell? we use them only because their inventory connects to ours epos point but because they have thousands of 301s on our domain we are getting duplicate content because different sizes of products (we sell womenswear) are creating seperate URLS so we are duplicating both content and URLS - im curious as to whether anyone has experienced simillar problems that have affected their SERPS? Best wishes, Chris
On-Page Optimization | | DaWillow1 -
Does putting content in tabs devalue it at all?
Hello! Still very new to the SEO world and just trying to soak in as much information as I can. The site I work for took a substantial hit with the panda update, so we are looking into adding as much quality content as we can in the upcoming months. With our current site layout, space will quickly become an issue. Assuming the content is relevant and useful for the page, will putting the content into tabs be counter productive or devalue it at all?
On-Page Optimization | | davegtt0 -
Google indexing Internal Search Results
Greeting, Currently I have noticed that Google is starting to index our internal search page results. Should I block those pages in our robot txt file or have you ever heard of any websites that actually gained traffic or rank by letting Google index those pages? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Tonyd230