Inktomi (HotBot, Excite, About.com) index text in HTML comments

The Inktomi search engine powers several smaller search sites (HotBot, Excite, About.com). Besides indexing general text content it also indexes text in HTML comments. So if you have HTML comments in your web pages you shouldn't be worried to much about them being just a waste of web space and traffic.

Let's say that the comments in your web page look like this:

<!-- Start of my web photo gallery -->
...
<!-- End of my web photo gallery -->

These comments will be indexed by Inktomi and a user searching for a web photo gallery should be able to see the web gallery in his search results. The SEO effect from HTML comments is really small since the above search sites occupy just a tiny fraction of the search market. However it doesn't hurt keeping the HTML comments in your HTML code especially when these comments contain meaningful text.