comment tag phenomema

[joeyscc]

I have a buddy saying he got this program that you enter your keywords in and does a search on SE's to see where you rank etc ....but he noticed it was coming up as "not found" with his keywords. However, we know his site is listed and know his ranks.

A discovery shown that if he removed his few comment tags <!--details--> (yes he did the closing properly) from the page(s) that the search he did again now came up with results.

So....question....using comment tags in your page code to help separate sections for reviewing (table pages and also those with div's - css), is this comment tag usage a bad thing?? We were thinking about how these would also effect SE robots...

[David Harrison]

SE bots aren't stupid, if you put stuff inside a comment then the bot will just ignore it because either it is a comment to aid developers or it is to trick the search engine into ranking your page higher.

You are using it to try and trick the search engine into giving you a better ranking, but the search engines job is to try and return the best results possible for a users search. You sticking some key-words into a comment is not going to help the user at all.

I've moved this thread to the Search Engines forum as it is more suitable.

[joeyscc]

Actually he's not using it for tricking the search engines nor does he have his keywords in the comment tags....he was just using comment tags to separate sections in his code....but still looking for an answer why comment tags would even affect the program to see where his site is ranked by entering in keywords?