I came across an interesting website...

[I am Nick]

I have been in discussion with a small retailer in the leather business to remake their webpage based on information available. The webpage is www.tropicalleather.com . The discussions has been for month but now finalized. The market leader in this race is www.exoticleather.biz . When analyzing their webpage I could clearly see that they know what things are about, but are far from unbeatable in any area.

However, I found something repeated on every page many times (sometimes up to 10 times!!). <! exotics, leathers, skins, etc, hundreds of words>. This is one of the things on their webpage that I don't really get. Are they spamming? If it just a tag, and not indexed, I can not really see why they are ranked to high on all relative searches.

Should I adopt this as well?

I guess that as soon as I have cleaned up the worst mess and improved the conversion ratio, I will join an affiliate marketing program.

BR / Nick

[flood6]

It is just keywords in html comment tags. If that technique ever worked, it stopped working a long time ago.

All it does is make the pages load a little slower. I doubt it is anything that could get you banned, but there's no chance in hell that it helps.

cbp often points to Google's "Quality Indicators" as having an influence on a site's SERPs; that technique definitely gives a "low quality" message to me, likely google, too.

Don't waste your time or your visitors bandwidth with that one.

[Maximilian]

Greetings - I am Nick!

One easy thing you can do to get an edge over your competion is to be careful to make your anchor links to your product lines become more like "keyword phrases" real folks actually search for.

For "keyword phrase linking" examples:

Instead of the link "Snake Collection", change link to "Snake Leather Wallets".

Instead of the link "Crocodile Collection", change link to "Crocodile Leather Clutch Purses".

Instead of the link "Stingray Collection", change link to "Stingray Leather Key Holder".

Etc., etc., etc....

Cheers!
Max

[mark3738]

I wouldn't be worrying too much about the 'extra' comments that they have added either, but would suggest that aside from this the one thing that the opposition website does have is a lot more viewable content on their index page.
As this is the first page the spiders generally visit, I would look at a strategy of getting a lot more content onto your redesign index page and let the items for sale take secondary position on this page anyway.
However, you may already be doing this and I have not really answered your intial question, but feel that, rather than worry too much about the opposition's potential spamming technique, I would be investigating their other words, and how you can match or better this in your redesign

[expertseo]

Dear all,

The value of comment tag has finished long time and long time ago so its the wastage of time to make comments and to put lots of keywords... SE's do not read comment tags.


Regards,
Mohit,


==================================
www.indian-sandstone-exporters.com(Exporters,Wholesale and suppliers of indian natural sandstone,limestone,granite,slate,quartzite stone,marble tiles and slabs from india.)

[I am Nick]

Thanks for all replies especially in regard of those extra comments. Regret my input is so late, but I thought I had a watch on this topic?

Yes, I will mainly work on anchor text, and good internal linking for a start. It could probably not get any worse.....

BR Nick