: Does a broken link within conditional comments have any effect on SEO? I have many sites with this old code which is intended to direct IE6 users to get a newer browser or to get Google

@Goswami781

HTML comments have ZERO value for SEO; crawlers just ignore the comment tag. They simply add no value.

Conditional HTML comments are treated the same, leaving them will not affect the performance of your site.

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@Turnbaugh106

IE7... was released in 2006

Google does not care about outdated browsers, it focuses on majority and majority doesn't use a browser released 11 years ago.

IE7 is older than most cars on the road in the UK

If you want to cater for users with browsers older than most cars on the road in the UK then you should change the HTML code so it includes a new link or no link with just the message. It should be noted that most IE7 users will encounter millions of websites that do not render and most of these sites will not inform the user to upgrade their browser.

IE7 has 263 vulnerabilities

It's extremely unlikely that 'real' users will visit your site using IE7, it has over 263 known vulnerabilities and personally I wouldn't bloat my code for these few users.

Traffic

With all this said it boils down to how many users visit the site, if you receive millions of unique visitors a month then the 'amount' of people using IE7 increasing therefore it may be worth while having, but for the majorty of sites with hundreds to a few thousand visitors a month, it'll be extremely rare to see a spike in IE7 user agents lurking in the log, if they do they could also be 'naughty' bots.

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