Do Search Engine Spiders Read Commented Out Content?

[lbohen]

Do Search Engine Spiders Read Commented Out Content?

Is commented out content detrimental?

[FedeEinhorn]

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.

[TakeshiYoung]

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.