IE Marquee tag

Does Google read the Marquee tag?

[kpaul]

The Marquee tag is an HTML tag/element that only works on IE. Doesn't show on other browsers. You can enclose whatever you want in between the tags - lots of keywords for example - that will scroll in IE but not other browsers (at least Mozilla).

1) Is this 'cloaking' because the bot can see it but some users can't?

2) Does it depend how many words are put into it?

3) Or does Fredbot just ignore it?

Thanks.

Mods: not sure if this would be good to post or not because it discusses a possible spam technique? if you decide to post, feel free to delete this little bit ;)

[sullen]

Google quite definately does read the contents of a marquee tag.

I know because my erstwhile top-performing site is down to just one page in google and terms in the marquee are the only terms it lists well for. sniff.

It's not cloaking because it does show in other browsers - it just doesn't work properly (the text is displayed in a big lump without scrolling, at least, it is in Netscape).

[JasonHamilton]

MARQUEE works fine in the latest version of netscape.

[drbrain]

Mozilla supports marquee, for almost a year (I remember what a controversy adding that was). See Revision 3.160 to html.css:

[bonsai.mozilla.org...]

[kpaul]

Weird, it wouldn't show up ok for me. Using 1.4 PR1...

So if it's legal and ethical, is it a good idea? You could fit a lot of (rrelevant of course) keywords in there...

[coolasafanman]

IMHO marquees make a website look amateurish, and regardless of what placement it might give you, people will leave and go elsewhere upon seeing the site.

[philipp]

Every browser, upon arriving on an unknown tag, should render its text-content. <marquee>, even though no official W3C HTML element, does include its text not as attribute-values, but as element-content. Therefore, it should be found just right by all search engines. The Googlebot should be expected to act just like those browsers.

Wether or not Marquee should be used on a page for usability reasons is yet another topic... and my answer to that, in short, is -- no, don't use marquee. Or blink. Or anything else that would partially/ temporarily hide content. "That's *so* 90s...".

However, if you're pressured from a client to include scrolling text, I would say Marquee is still better than a Java scroller. DHTML might be a good alternative, though, but I'd rather invest my time telling the customer that it's just not worth it (quite the opposite) before implementing such things.

[Seattle_SEM]

I'm sure the marquee tag works, and I'm sure the BLINK tag works, too, if we're giving lessons on how to make a site look tacky ;-)

[WebMistress]

Once upon a time I used <marquee> on my site, and google definitely sees it and uses it, because it actually showed up as a description in serps for one of my keywords. So, it's not penalized in any way either.