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
-
Targeting Home page is better for local seo
Hey guys i need know whether targeting homepage for local SEO is good or creating separate page for locatin
On-Page Optimization | | moz12pro0 -
Q& A section - SEO perspective
We have a software in our website where customers can ask questions and it will send questions to people who already bought it to get answers. The answers are there in each item page. So each item page has item description , reviews, and Q&A sections. We get lot of questions and answers and software is great but we don't know if it really is helping us for the huge price we are paying them. In an SEO perspective will it help due to content or will it dilute main keywords due to the Q&A content? Thanks RB
On-Page Optimization | | rbai2 -
On page SEO Strategy / What pages to use?
What is the best page to use for targeting your hard to rank keywords? The keyword phrases in question here are "Acrylic Tank Manufacturing", "Custom Aquariums", & "Acrylic Aquariums" As of right now we have created 3 separate pages for each one of these keyword phrases. http://seaquaticaquariums.com/custom-aquariums for "Custom Aquariums" http://www.seaquaticaquariums.com/custom-aquariums/acrylic-aquariums/ for "Acrylic Aquariums" http://www.seaquaticaquariums.com/services/acrylic-tank-manufacturing/ for "Acrylic Tank Manufacturing" Or are we better of using the home page http://www.seaquaticaquariums.com/ for the our main hard to rank for terms. Generally speaking I would think more people will link to our home page.
On-Page Optimization | | SeaQuatic0 -
All category seo plugin on Wordpress page title to working
I've installed the all category seo plugin for Wordpress and all works fine except the page title I input doesn't show. Anyone else had that problem?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
SEO for New Magento Site??!?
Hi All, We have had a new site delivered by our developers (hurrah...the old one was to terrible for words) but we seem to be having a lot of issues with the new Magento platform. What they have done is used the community version and tried to customize it. I came on to this project about a month into the build and although Magento does seem to do a lot things well there do seem to be some problems. From an SEO prespective we have seen some increase on some search terms and a drop of in others. I would be interested in hearing from other Magento users about their experiences with this platform and any ideas on how to crank up the activity. Our site is at www.nationwidepharmacies.co.uk . There are few odd bits including the side navigation which seems to be very clunky and not overly customizable in this version. Any useful criticism would also be well received. Look forward to hearing Nic
On-Page Optimization | | nicc19760 -
On Page SEO Tool
Hello - I'm looking for one tool that does the following and was wondering if anyone knew of such a tool? In a perfect world I would like to enter in one domain name and have a report generated that shows All Internal links, link titles, and anchor text All internal broken links / redirects All images, image size and image alt, if the image alt is missing. I'd love to be about to export these reports to excel and quickly run my on page optimization. The goal is to produce a checklist for a developer to execute quickly. Thanks for your help Gabe
On-Page Optimization | | Gabe0 -
Would I be safe canonicalizing comments pages on the first page?
We are building comment pages for an article site that live on a separate URL from the article (I know this is not ideal, but it is necessary). Each comments page will have a summary of the article at the top. Would I be safe using the first page of comments as the canonical URL for all subsequent comment pages? Or could I get away with using the actual article page as the canonical URL for all comment pages?
On-Page Optimization | | BostonWright0 -
Very basic hands-on type of question about SEO
Hello, I am a complete newbie to the world of SEO and I have read few thing available on the net about things to begin with (so google seo guide and then seomoz beginers tutorial) and I just wanted to ask if I understand the process correctly: So I have my website lest call it abcd.com and there I might have a subpage about certain type of robots or specific parts that these robots are built from. I do my keyword search using adwords keyword search tool. Where I get 10 phrases (phrase1, phrase2, phrase3 so on..) that could be used by users to search information about certain type of robots I wrote on my website. Let's asume all 10 of those phrases have low competition so they can all be used. And they are from the long tail ofcourse so let's say I can get 10,000 searches from them per month. Some of them would have 200 searches, some 1500, some 5000 per month in that google adwords report. After reading those basic tutorials I understand it this way: I put one or two best phrases of those 10 in my <title></p> <p>2) I describe the website as accurately as possible to those keywords in <meta description> i.e. Those specific robots are built from those specific parts - we know all about them.</p> <p>3) I put all of them in <meta keywords> phrase1,2,3, etc.</p> <p>4) I use one or two phrases in <h1> on the page with article</p> <p>5) then I use those phrases in the text that's on that particular page of my website - text is about certain type of robots and parts etc.</p> <p>6) I put photos on that page with alt descriptions that may contain some of these phrases</p> <p>7) to be honest I don't know how am I suppose to build links from that page about certain type of robots to anywhere else on my website - but I undestand that's the part of SEO as well</p> <p>And that's pretty much how I understand the basics of SEO. I read about it and I just don't know if that's what I am suppose to do. Silly me!</p> <p> </p></title>
On-Page Optimization | | lolskizz1