Marquee search-engine spam
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.
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... 
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 and is filed under SEO, Spam, Web1.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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November 12th, 2005 at 5:51 am
Huh, that’s very tricky…but i hate spammers.
October 4th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Well, marquee definitely works for feeding with lots of links
Look at http://www.fincasmudarra.com/intro.php I’m not sure if this raises Matt Cutts’ eyebrows there in the States, but for the SERP of other versions of the Google it doesn’t seem to be regarded as spam.
October 4th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
Wow, that’s 50+ hrefs in the marquee!
November 29th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
I’d say more advanced artificial intelligence Forms is the way to go.. Atleast then you don’t have bots spamming your page..
November 14th, 2011 at 5:37 pm
Thats is a really good post. You know blogs are one of the most amazing piece of 21st century that I admire very much. Blogs are more than just pages, read what Seth Godin has to say about them, you will be thrilled.