Do search engines index comments?

This test will seek to determine if search engines index comments within HTML source code.

An HTML comment looks like this:

<!-- This is a comment. -->

Testing Methodology

This page contains an HTML comment. This comment can be seen if you view the source code to this page.

Evaluation Methodology

View the source code to this web page to see the comment. Search for the HTML comment in these search engines. If this page shows up in the search results, then that search engine most likely indexes comments.

Search Engine	Expected Result
Google	No
Yahoo	Unknown
MSN	Unknown
AltaVista	Unknown
AllTheWeb	Unknown

Caveats

This page was put online on 27 April, 2004. It will take some time for each search engine to crawl and index this page to make this test "live."

A malicious person could link to this page using the unique string in the HTML comment as link text. This would force a false positive on most search engines and invalidate the test results.

The FAQs