Sphinn - Google Duped By Massive Comment Tag Stuffing Ploy

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Google Duped By Massive Comment Tag Stuffing Ploy

Went Hot: February 6, 2008 - 3:24 pm
Posted By: mikemurray 515 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.fathomseo.com)
Category: SEO

Maybe excessive comment tag stuffing can pay off since Google doesn't seem to notice. See how one major website gets away with it on page after page. Is it wrong?

10 Comments

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from crashtheory 515 days ago #

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Nice Article! Brings back many memories of Meta Keywords!

from johnnygoat00 515 days ago #

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Mike, this is worth exploring further. I hope people find other examples of the comment tag explosion. Comment tags, primarily used by developers to communicate about html intricacies with each other, are gnerally thought in our industry to not affect search engine rankings, despite popular urban legends. I like stuffed-crust pizza as much as the next guy, but when I see an example like what you've just given, I have to wonder just what kind of pizza Google is serving up. I hope Sphinn readers can help to unravel the mystery in the kitchen.

from mikemurray 515 days ago #

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Thanks for the feedback; wish I could be more up front about what we found - but who wants to make lawyers rich? Some of the rankings aren't great, but the amount of text has us wondering what influence may be there for any number of keywords.

from bwelford 515 days ago #

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Mike, this is interesting. Did you do a search for small portions of the Comments in " "? That would really be the kicker in determining how they're treating comments.

from mikemurray 515 days ago #

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I think you mean testing any unique text to see if it ranks...we quickly found some decent terms that made the top 30 (not top 10)...any string seems to rank...and the snippets are coming right from the stuffed keywords...the snippets are often don't even make sense because the stuffing was just a string of keywords - no one even bothered with commas...who cares when you can't be seen I guess. Thanks for the comment and letting others know about the article.

from dannysullivan 515 days ago #

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It's been ages since I tested which search engines index comment material, probably because few if any did. So Mike, it would be useful to see if the text is really getting indexed (you can private message me). Somehow I suspect that the pages are doing well for entirely different reasons.

from g1smd 515 days ago #

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Comment text should be ignored by all of the search engines.
I would be surprised if comments are having any effect at all.

from incrediblehelp 515 days ago #

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Are we going to see the keywords this website ranks for and the comment text?

I am sure plenty of website have poor SEO techniques like this being implemented (on purpose or by accident) and Google simple ignores them. I really feel most of the penalties for this kind of stuff is hand jobbed.

Also is the website a high authority website? meaning one Google would be hard pressed to remove from the results? if so then that should answer your question on why it has not been removed algorithmically.

from mikemurray 514 days ago #

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Danny brought up good points - that the website could be ranking for any number of reasons - domain age, links, anchor text. Given the amount of times the overstuff comment tags appear - every page with hundreds of keywords - it may be difficult to tell the real source of ranking influence. I'll do some other tests with search terms buried in the comment tags that don't seem well-supported by the content, title and inbound anchor text. We've already done that to an extent - unqiue text in the comment tag (i.e. unique to the tag text and not the site) does rank and reflects that the tag is crawled and used. The surprising use of the comment tag text as the snippet is another sign of its influence.

from JohnMu 514 days ago #

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HTML comments are comments by and for the developer(s), not content :-). I can't think of a reason for us to use them for normal web-search.

There is one place where we do use them: http://www.google.com/codesearch
(it doesn't cover HTML documents though :-))