Google does not read the hidden and personal comments in html, right?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Pablo Caño: Hi everyone!
  Question for you all:
  Google does not read the hidden and personal comments in html, right? But, then does Google read the links in the personal comments in html? For example, something like this:
  <!--
   ; ;I like beer and my page is the best http://www.diariodeunamaraton.com/
  -->
  Curious to hear your thoughts! ;)
• 
  Federico Sasso: Search engines have long time ago learned to ignore all those tricks from the '90s.
  They use proper html parsers, able to recognizes an html comment and skip it
• 
  Pablo Caño: It's what I thought. I know that the theory is that Google ignore this kind of comments, but in practice… Im not really sure. Thank u!!!
• 
  Edwin Jonk: +Pablo Caño ;can you disable the link in the sense that it is not a link, like ;www(dot)diariodeunamaraton(dot)com
  Thanks in advance.
  
  We do know that Googlebot does use plain text URL's as a way to discover new URL's [1]. I think Google will parse out the URL and take a look. But I don't think any value is being given by the URL.
  
  [1] ;http://dejanseo.com.au/seo-experiment-with-non-link-references/
• 
  Federico Sasso: +Pablo Caño ;just out of curiosity: what makes you suspect Google evaluates links in html comments content?
• 
  Pablo Caño: +Federico Sasso I'm pretty sure it's counting the links from this website http://lacartadelabolsa.com/ to this one www.expansion.com For example: <li><a href="http://www.expansion.com/2013/09/19/opinion/1379623661.html" target="_blank">La decisión de la Fed debería llevar a la reflexión</a></li>Estoy bastante seguro de que está contanto los enlaces a www.expansion.com desde esta web http://lacartadelabolsa.com/  ; ; ; ; ; ;
• 
  Edwin Jonk: I don't think those links are being "counted" in the sense that they provide search value. What I do think is that googlebot is following those links as a way to explore new URL's. That is Google is crawling the URL not counting the URL.
• 
  Pablo Caño: I'm probably wrong. Thank you very much for your answers!!! ;))
• 
  Federico Sasso: +Pablo Caño ;I see the cached version of lacartadelbolsa.com is dated today, with the commented link. May be the supposed benefit is coming from a recent time when that html part wasn't commented?
  As Edwin said, Google is known to test non-linked URLs in plain text, but I'd be surprised if it did for those in html comments as well, because it used to be a diffused spam technique back in the old days.