CODEWITHSUNDEEP
indexinggooglebot
Guy Raif
Guy Raif

Reputation: 1

Is googlebot indexing links in html comments?

I got a huge number of NOT FOUND links on Google webmaster tool, looks like the links are coming from a section of code in the footer which was put in an HTML comment

All pages have NOARCHIVE tag so it's probably not a cache issue

Did this happen to anyone?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1735

Answers (2)

Polynomial
Polynomial

Reputation: 28316

A quick Google (ironic, eh?) shows that whilst there is no official word on the subject, the general concensus (through anecdotal and experimental evidence) is that Google will process everything including content in comment tags. This means that it will indeed index your links, even if they're in comment tags. However, it does not use the content as a source for keyword searches, i.e. anything in a HTML comment is not considered to be part of your page's visible content and is therefore not usable as part of search criteria.

HTML comments are designed to simply specify human-readable information about what your layout is doing, for example signifying where a particular include begins in a page outputted by a PHP script. You shouldn't be using HTML comments to remove large chunks of code in your site. I suggest that you remove the content.

If you don't want Google to follow a link, you can add rel="nofollow" to your hyperlink. You can also use robots.txt to specify directories or URL wildcards that you do not want Google to index.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/4270.htm
http://www.codingforums.com/archive/index.php/t-71686.html

Upvotes: 3

Axel Isouard
Axel Isouard

Reputation: 1506

If you are talking about links in comments between tags, I don't think they are taking effect with Google Bots as stated there and there.

Regards.

Upvotes: 0

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