Are Search Engines Crawling Links in HTML Comments?

Posted by , SEO Resume in SEO

I was looking through a client's data in Google Webmaster Tools recently and noticed tens of thousands of bad internal links. All of these links could be boiled down to a handful of patterns which struck me as odd because I should've noticed these bad links before. A little digging revealed that Google has been aggressively crawling links that are in JavaScript code.

I could sort of see search engines following fully qualified links (i.e. with http and a full path) in JavaScript code since there's a good chance those links will lead to a real page. However, the links I found were part of a concatenation of strings that required execution of the JavaScript to actually be valid. Here's what I mean:

link = 'http://' + somevariable + '/somepage.php' + someothervariable;

Google decided that it would be a good idea to check out '/somepage.php' which of course is invalid without the variables before and after it.

So what this long-winded intro leads me to is the question of what is the current state of affairs at Google (and the other search engines) when it comes to links in HTML comments? I should have an answer to that in a few days...

Update: January 8, 2009
My experiments suggest Google isn't crawling links that are within HTML comment tags.

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