Keywords within Comment Tags

[TMCG]

say you're business is car sales, if you put

<!--car sales-->

all over your code, does that do anything as far as boosting anything...eerrr, ya know what i mean...uuuhhh

[Logan]

nah, no stupid questions. i guarantee if you are asking 100s of others don't know either.

I wouldn't include keywords in comments for optimization. Nothing wrong with using them for their intended use, but not worthwhile for keyword optimization - imo.

[Cavendo]

Originally Posted by Logan

nah, no stupid questions. i guarantee if you are asking 100s of others don't know either.

I wouldn't include keywords in comments for optimization. Nothing wrong with using them for their intended use, but not worthwhile for keyword optimization - imo.

I agree. So many people try different kinds of tactics to put extra keywords or tags on their site to attract attention. Frankly, I think the search engines are starting to penalize these types of activities.

Stick with the basics. Focus on finding other legitimate sites that will link to you. Avoid "link farms" or sites that will sell you a link on their site (e.g., "PR7 site link") like the plague!

[torka]

The SEs won't penalize you for putting keywords in comment tags. They simply don't index comment tags, to my knowledge. They never have, AFAIK.

If you want to test this for yourself, try putting a made-up nonsense word in a comment tag on one of your pages. Wait for that page to be indexed, then search on that made-up word to see if the contents of the comment tag were indexed along with the rest of the page. Unless something serious has changed very recently with the SE's, the answer will be "no."

Comment tags are supposed to be used for annotating your code for your own purposes, so you can put anything in there you want to. Just don't expect it to do anything whatsoever for you in terms of rankings.

It isn't spam, and it isn't a trick. It's simply useless (for SEO).

--Torka

[vangogh]

Not going to help at all. I think Torka is right in that the comments will just be ignored, but if I was a search engine I would think it would be a good way to determine who was trying to spam me. It wouldn't surprise me then if they do look at comment tags as a way to flag certain sites.

That's really just speculation on my part, though.

The best way to use comment tags is to help make something in your code clearer to you when you have to go back and look at it or when someone else needs to look at it.

Not something that's going to help with search engines, though you can always try to test as Torka suggests and see what happens.

[pes123]

i agree with torka. excellent reply that is.

[askdmatthews]

Even if it did work, I think it would still be considered spamming by google and once your competitors realize that you're spamming and stealing their traffic, you can be assured they will report it.

[hitweb]

The best way to get keywords in your website is to write them into your copy. Although, keep in mind that the first thing to consider, when building a website, is the actual people that will be visiting the website, not the spiders. If you do every trick in the book to get ranked higher in the search engines and end up at the top of the list on the best keywords, it does you absolutely no good if people don't stay on your site and "convert" because the copy makes no sense or isn't enjoyable to look at.

Always always always build your website for conversions first, then focus on getting people there. A customer lost once is often a customer lost forever.

[royhunters]

Ugh, I think the question was answered 3 years ago, this is a very old thread.

[AirForce1]

I don't think it is useful for SEO. HTML includes such tags for comment purpose and all search engines would obey this standard, too. IMO.