Developer comments in code & SEO

[zabba]

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

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[AlanMosley]

I dont use comments either, i like to see nice easy to read html

[EGOL]

Developer comments would not survive on one of my sites.

[AlanMosley]

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.

[groovykarma]

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.

[zabba]

Thanks, just a file size issue then. Sorry the image is taken from SEOmoz as an example.

[DougRoberts]

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.

[Theo-NL]

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).