Here is a question I never saw asked before - which is rare. A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster asking how Google handles the content within a strike or delete tag.
The strike tag is not supported in HTML5 and was replaced by the del tag but they both do the same thing. For example, if you want to strike a word in HTML, it would look like this. But is Google reading, indexing and ranking the words within the strike or del tags?
Google's John Mueller responded to the thread adding:
If these are only additional mentions of the same kind of content as you otherwise have on the page (and not the only mentions, or the primary content of the page), then removing them is fine.
So let's try it, I am going to put the following in the del tag and see if this page ranks any time in the near future. The phrase is erjdlcytnslx84mdss2.
Let's see what Google does with it.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Update: It looks like Google News indexed it so far:
