Google’s John Mueller shared some intentionally bad SEO advice in a lighthearted response to a satirical Reddit thread.
In a thread inviting bad SEO advice – because “the moderators are all busy,” – Mueller took the opportunity to show his humorous side.
Clearly he hasn’t lost his sense of humour with all that’s going on in the world.
Here’s hoping you find it an entertaining break from an otherwise tumultuous news cycle.
Bad SEO Advice
Marquee Tag
The original poster of the thread recommended putting everything in a marquee tag, which Mueller conceded is an awesome feature.
Horizontally scrolling text on a web page doesn’t fit everyone’s idea of awesome, however, which is why the marquee tag is now obsolete.
The marquee tag is representative of a bygone era in web design where pages had one too many moving pieces.
If it existed today, it’s hard to imagine it would meet Google’s criteria for a good user experience.
Fun fact – you can still see it in action.
The marquee tag lives on as an Easter egg in Google’s search results.
Just search for “marquee tag” and watch for the moving text.
<blink> Tag
Mueller brought up another relic by recommending the <blink> tag:
“There’s also which is a great way to add non-deterministic cloaking (aka Schrödinger’s Indexing) to pages. It drives the webspam team crazy.”
The tag is a deprecated HTML element that was used to create flashing text.
You can just imagine how annoying that would be. It’s no wonder why it also became obsolete.
Like the marquee tag, the blink tag is memorialized in Google search as a lesser-known Easter egg.
Search for “<blink>” to get a blast from the past.
Now I can’t help but wonder what a combination of the marquee tag and blink tag would look like.
Perhaps it’s best that we may never know the answer to that.
Source: Reddit
