: Is content inside IE conditional comments indexed by search engines? Although I'm aware of the various methods to show content only to users of a specific IE version, I was wondering if using
Although I'm aware of the various methods to show content only to users of a specific IE version, I was wondering if using conditional comments would have an effect on the way my site is indexed. If I choose to use conditional comments, I don't want to see something like this in Google search results:
Is this a possibility?
Please note that the above is merely an example. Another example could be marking up an entire section of the page targeted at Internet Explorer:
<!--[if IE 6]>
<div>
<h3>IE6 Instructions</h3>
<p>To save the foobar, right click the link and select "Save as..."</p>
<p>More content for IE6...</p>
</div>
<![endif]-->
Could this on its own ever return a result for the phrase "foobar", i.e. would this content be indexed by any relevant crawlers?
Is content inside IE conditional comments indexed by any search engines?
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You can choose whether to hide your IE-only content within HTML comments (downlevel-hidden), or within Microsoft proprietary tags (downlevel-revealed). The difference is that using the comment form hides the content from all other browsers (and Googlebot is, after all, just a type of browser) while the tags get ignored but their content rendered.
Microsoft has a description of the two formats:
msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537512(v=vs.85).aspx
IE conditional comments are just a special kind of HTML comments. It is accepted that search engines do not index or give any weight to content in HTML comments. From a StackOverflow answer where they give a quote from Matt Cutts:
I believe that we have the ability to
index them, but we usually don't index
comments.
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