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.

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

How cool is that! :D

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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5 Responses to “Marquee search-engine spam”

  1. Iv0_b0y Says:

    Huh, that’s very tricky…but i hate spammers.

  2. Marta Says:

    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.

  3. Stoyan Says:

    Wow, that’s 50+ hrefs in the marquee! ;)

  4. Erling Ericsson Says:

    I’d say more advanced artificial intelligence Forms is the way to go.. Atleast then you don’t have bots spamming your page.. :)

  5. thetravian Says:

    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.

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