Marquee search-engine spam

November 10th, 2005. Tagged: SEO, Spam, Web1.0

Marquee (<marquee>) - does anybody remember this IE-only HTML tag? Does anybody still use it? This sooo ooold, pre-historic, 20th century, Web1.0-ish tag 🙂 . Thinking about marquee and falling into a nostalgic mood, how about the blink tag, eh? OK, I simply cannot resist the temptation of using them here.

marquee - Look ma, stuff moves without JS!
This blinks, doesn't it?

How cool is that! 😀

Actually I was a bit surprised to find out that Firefox supports marquee. I wonder when did this non-standard, behavioural and otherwise totally plain wrong tag slip through the cracks. Anyway, that's not the point.

Today I was visiting a site (no URL, sorry) and I noticed some weirdness at the bottom of the page. Viewing the source had a surprise in store - a 1 pixel wide marquee tag full of keywords, many keywords, repeated keywords, search engine keywords... you get the point. Apparently this was aiming at the poor googlebot and the other search engine spiders, trying to convince them that this page is worth more (in keyword weight) than it actually is. Spammers!

Here's an example of the spam technique.
<marquee width="1">Blah, blah, some keywords and more keywords</marquee>

Oh well... 🙁

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