Developer comments in code & SEO
-
A client of mine has provided an SEO report that states:-
"The inclusion of comments by developers in the coe is common practice.....
....its is not positive to leave large blocks of code in the site as makes crawling difficult to crawl"
Im thinking that this has no SEO import at all, any one come across this?
Thanks
z
-
I dont use comments either, i like to see nice easy to read html
-
Developer comments would not survive on one of my sites.
-
Some developers over use comments and can make the file larger and slower, also push content too far down the page.
It can stuff up crawling depending what is in the comments.
I dont believe in minifying code so it can not be easaly read and debuged, but on the other hand you should try to keep code clean as posible, dont use comments if they are not really needed.
-
As a web application developer, I liberally use inline comments (code at the header and inline with code). It's a key to maintaining the code over long periods of time (we forget what we did and why) and across teams (somebody else may need to update code I originally wrote).
That said, I use comments surrounded with tags that do not end up in the HTML code rendered to a visitor. Most languages that "create" HTML code as output (ColdFusion, PHP, etc) usually have tags so comments can be used without being seen in the HTML.
In my opinion, this is the way to go.
Neil, you're probably concerned with the comments in HTML comment tags. I cannot help you there. For those of you who can suggest best practices to site owners and developers, ask that whenever possible inline comments are in tags that **do not show up in final HTML. **
Also, as a practice, I do not want the World seeing (or reverse-engineering) my code based on my comments. Use them as a web developer yet hide comments in output so SEOs do not have headaches of wondering how it affects rankings/page performance.
I hope that helps.
-
Thanks, just a file size issue then. Sorry the image is taken from SEOmoz as an example.
-
The comments you highlighted are actually Internet Explorer conditionals used to give different versions of IE different style sheets. I don't think there's any SEO problem here. (Although I recognise this isn't your site)
Removing them may cause you problems with the layout/style of your site.
-
Comments visible in HTML code do increase the file size, but assuming these blocks of code are of a reasonably normal size, that shouldn't be a problem. Search engines ignore everything that is commented out (mainly because it would make gaming the system so easy).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is it recommended to use SEO plugin for falamakmachine site?
Hello good time Is it recommended to use SEO plugin for dedicated sites? Or do you think we should change the dedicated CMS to WordPress based on the convenient user interface that WordPress has. http://www.falamakmachine.com/productListDetail.aspx?catID=1
On-Page Optimization | | falamakmachine0 -
Cross-linking for mobile SEO
Hi everyone! I am having a hard time finding information about weather to/how to apply internal seo linking to mobile versions of sites. We decided to go with dynamic serving with user agent detection. Our desktop site has a quite heavy seo-internal-cross-linking. As I understand, for mobile we should simplify and focus on usability, so get rid of unnecessary links. But I have a doubt about weather removing this part of the web structure can hurt our SEO. Do Google mobile bots look at and rank mobile versions of pages from scratch or do they use what they know about the site and the site's structure from its desktop version?
On-Page Optimization | | ofertia0 -
Removing & redirecting old pages
Hi In the case of an e-commerce store when you remove/delete an old sub department page because you no longer sell the products that page was for can you/should you redirect it to its parent main category/dept page first or just delete and let become a 404 ? Being a sub department it is obviously closely related to the main category/dept but seem strange to 301 it since its not really moved permanently to that page but i hear that's what people do to transfer that pages authority before deleting it so its not lost cheers dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
SEO and PDFs
Hi there, how could I incorpore the PDF's documents of my site to the SEO strategy in order to optimize the page in which is included in? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | juanmiguelcr0 -
Need to hire an SEO consultant to fix my website
Just started using SEOmoz and discovered lots of issues with my site. Need some help. Obviously the person could access my SEOmoz account and make sense of all that is needed. Then either go to my website and fix or tell me what to do. Thanks, Scott
On-Page Optimization | | ecoscott0 -
Html and css errors - what do SE spiders do if they come across coding errors? Do they stop crawling the rest of the code below the error
I have a client who uses a template to build their websites (no problem with that) when I ran the site through w3c validator it threw up a number of errors, most of which where minor eg missing close tags and I suggested they fix them before I start their off site SEO campaigns. When I spoke to their web designer about the issues I was told that some of the errors where "just how its done" So if that's the case, but the validator still registers the error, do the SE spiders ignore them and move on, or does it penalize the site in some way?
On-Page Optimization | | pab10 -
Home Page SEO
Hi! We recently re-designed our home page in early March. After Google panda, we re-tweaked it again, before we take it live, we really want to get some expert's opinions. We would be grateful for any comments/suggestions/feedback, particularly in the following area (you will need to click a few times to get the page to real size): is the bottom content ok? please scroll down all the way. 2) We used semantic keywords for 5-6 anchor interlinks to the same page to promote core products from the home page. Is this too much? 80% links on the footer is a repetition of header navigation links, do these footer serve any SEO value or is it over - optimization? Here is the URL: https://www.dropbox.com/gallery/36547134/1/WebDesign?h=109d4a Thanks a lot!
On-Page Optimization | | ypl0 -
Best SEO structure for blog
What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings. Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article. I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about. I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic. I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article. Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)? Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0