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Google Duped By Massive Comment Tag Stuffing Ploy
By Mike Murray | February 6, 2008
Oh sure, I know Google claims to hate hidden text. And why not, if you try to trick the search engine into giving you a high ranking, they should rightly make a stink about it in their guidelines.
Sometimes guidelines whimper instead of showing their teeth.
We’ve come across a real doozy that shows Google’s vulnerabilities and a possible casual attitude.
It’s a prominent website that abuses the comment tag and gets away with it – on virtually every single page.
What is wrong with Google? Why can’t this industry and corporate giant detect this trick among its 200 ranking signals?
Here are the quick facts followed by some serious questions to consider:
1. The website has hundreds of pages.
2. Every single page has the same text in the comment tag.
3. Actually, there are 2 sets of comment tag stuffing on each page – the same keywords (more than 400) in each set on each page.
4. The homepage barely has any text (maybe that’s why some SEO “professional” stuffed the comment tags in desperation.
5. Some decent three-word search phrases have made it in the top 30 (and who knows how many variations of other phrases).
So maybe it does help to cram keywords into the comment tags. I always thought visible text development was the best option.
With the repetition issue and vast number of pages, why can’t Google say: “Gee, this looks weird. I’m going to flag it and ban this website.” What’s the trigger event – 1,000 keywords and over?
I understand that comment tags are OK and no one can be faulted for including some of them. They have some value. But give me a break –
every page, tons of keywords and the same copy all of the time?
But the story gets sillier:
I used to think comment tags were off limits, but maybe Google really loves them or at least permits them more than I thought.
You might think the crawlers skip these tags. Since the website lacks text, maybe the comment tags are having more influence than you might suspect.
And here’s the kicker – Google is actually grabbing commented out text and using it as the snippets among the SERPs. How can that be? I thought Google frowned on this non-content.
So what’s your experience?
If Google rewards it, allows it or capitalizes on it for the SERPs, is it wrong to leverage hidden text within the comment tags?
By inheriting this approach, what’s a search engine optimization firm to do? If you delete it all, won’t the rankings suffer? And who bears the blame for that – the client, the old SEO agency or the new consultant?
Whether you hide text with white font on a white background or tuck keywords inside numerous comment tags, it’s still deception. Just feed Google one version of a page and serve up a pretty image-heavy page to the public.
If Google asks others to play fair, I would think it would be able to catch something on such a massive scale.
It shouldn’t always take a tattle-tale to get Google’s attention. Search engine ranking formulas should at least trigger alerts for Google staff who should check out a website and decide how to deal with what they see.
I thought comment tags tricks were Old School – old enough for Google to catch on. Maybe they’ve never gone out of style. Does anyone care?
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February 6th, 2008 at 11:04 am
But is Google using it for ranking purposes? Does the site rank for a unique phrase that’s only in the comment tag, and has not been used as anchor text anywhere?
February 6th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
For every tactic everyone claims no longer works, someone out there seems to get away with it. A competitor of a client of mine has a collection of sites that look like a museum of 1999 black-hat, and I swear it keeps working for him somehow.
Sometimes, I wonder if it’s a sort of indirect grandfathering. In other words, the trick used to work, and brought in links and search traffic, and now the site is benefiting from the results of the trick working 3 years ago. The trick doesn’t work anymore, and if you tried it now, you’d probably get slammed, but the appearance is that it’s still working for that other site.
February 6th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
I had the same thought as Donna. Google uses the description as a snippet if relevant, but does not use this in ranking. The best test is a search for a snippet from the Comment in ” “. If you have examples of that, Mike, then you’ve really hit on something very fundamental. Even without that, your item is intriguing. Thanks.
February 6th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Thanks for the comments. It ranks for competitive terms and unique text in the comment tag. I’m surprised this comment tag text ended up in the snippet. Wish I could add more. It’s a significant website, not some fly-by-nighter or small website. I just can’t believe Google filters don’t catch this sort of thing.
February 6th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Mike how do you know if this stuffing is helping?
How do you know this type of keyword stuffing hurts other websites?
How do you know one of the other 200 ranking factors simply trumps these poor optimization techniques? I commonly see authority websites getting aware with murder.
February 7th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Web designers use comment tags all the time – particularly when using SSI files for site-wide content. These comments can be very helpful on large sites when finding the right bit of HTML code is tedious.
However, the use of comment tags in this case is obviously different than stuffing 400 keywords into the tag for SEO tactics.
As such, I can’t imagine Google would ever penalize a site for content within those comment tags. At the same time, I have a very hard time believing that Google doesn’t simply ignore that content.
I’d love to know what site it is… have you reported them to Google or the other engines?
February 13th, 2008 at 11:42 am
We have small bits of copy in HTML comments on our sites that do not get picked up at all. They’re only commented for purposes of debugging the site, or some sloppy coding in some spots, but in testing the text is not indexed on Google. I’m thinking that the site you are referring to above is doing something else in conjunction with the HTML comments. They may be looking for specific user agents to display the copy to and every normal browser gets the commented copy. Either way, it’s spam. Just turn the site in (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en), and get them yanked from the index.
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