I still find marquees in the wild. Usually it is a 2009 promo banner nobody has touched, a scrolling stock ticker on a small-business homepage, or a "breaking news" strip glued to the top of a template that got copied from site to site. The instinct to make text move is old, and the <marquee> tag was the lazy way to do it. It needs to go.
What the marquee element actually is
<marquee> is a non-standard HTML element that scrolls or bounces its contents across the screen. It was a Microsoft Internet Explorer invention from the mid-1990s, Netscape had its own <blink> equivalent, and neither was ever part of a real HTML specification. The WHATWG HTML standard lists marquee as an obsolete feature that must not be used by authors. Browsers keep rendering it for backward compatibility, but "it still works" and "it is supported" are not the same thing.
Because it was never standardized, its attributes (behavior, direction, scrollamount, scrolldelay, loop) are quirky and inconsistent. You are building on a foundation the spec explicitly tells you to abandon, and one day a browser can drop it without warning you.
Why it matters for SEO and users
Search does not hand out a direct "marquee penalty." The damage is indirect, and indirect damage is still damage.
First, accessibility. Auto-moving content is one of the oldest WCAG failures on record. Success Criterion 2.2.2 (Pause, Stop, Hide) requires that any moving, blinking, or scrolling content lasting more than five seconds can be paused or stopped by the user. A raw marquee gives users no controls at all. Screen readers handle it unpredictably, and people with vestibular disorders or attention differences can find constant motion genuinely painful. Google has been loud for years that helpful, accessible, people-first content is what it wants to rank, so accessibility debt quietly works against you.
Second, layout stability and Core Web Vitals. Continuously animating text can trigger repaints and, depending on how it is built, contribute to layout shift. A janky, shifting hero region is a bad Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift story.
Third, trust. A scrolling neon banner reads as abandoned or amateur. If your page looks like it was frozen in a GeoCities era, users bounce, and bounce behavior on the pages that should convert is the kind of thing that shows up in your analytics before it shows up anywhere else.
How to detect marquees across a site
You want every instance, not just the one you happened to see.
- Screaming Frog: run a crawl, then use Custom Search or Custom Extraction with the string
<marqueeto flag every page whose rendered or raw HTML contains it. Export the URL list. - Source grep: if you have repo or theme access, grep the codebase for
marquee. Most instances live in a shared header, footer, or widget, so one template fix can clear dozens of URLs. - Browser check: open DevTools, search the DOM for the tag, and confirm whether it is hard-coded or injected by a script or plugin.
- Sitebulb or a validator: HTML validators and crawlers that flag obsolete elements will surface it as a warning.
How to fix it, step by step
- Decide if the motion is needed at all. Nine times out of ten the answer is no. Static text in a clean banner does the job. Delete the marquee tags and keep the inner content.
- If motion is truly required (a real ticker, a partner logo strip), rebuild it with CSS
@keyframesandtransform: translateX(). This is GPU-friendly and does not trigger the same layout thrash. - Add controls and respect preferences. Give users a visible pause control, and wrap the animation in a
@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)block that stops it for anyone who has asked their OS for less motion. That is how you satisfy WCAG 2.2.2 instead of ignoring it. - Fix the source, not the symptom. If a plugin or page builder injects the marquee, disable or replace that component so it does not come back on the next content edit.
- Re-crawl and confirm zero instances remain.
Deprecated versus modern approach
| Concern | <marquee> | CSS animation |
|---|---|---|
| Spec status | Obsolete, must not use | Standard |
| Pause control | None built in | Easy to add |
| Reduced-motion support | Ignores it | Fully supported |
| Performance | Repaints, unpredictable | GPU-composited transforms |
| Future-proof | Can be dropped anytime | Yes |
- Remove every <marquee> tag and keep the content inside it
- Rebuild real motion with CSS keyframes and transforms
- Honor
prefers-reduced-motionand offer a pause button - Fix the shared template or plugin so it does not return
- Re-crawl to verify zero remaining instances
- Keep it just because the browser still renders it
- Swap it for the equally dead <blink> tag
- Auto-scroll content with no way to stop it
- Animate the whole hero and wreck your layout stability
- Fix one page and ignore the template feeding the rest
What good looks like
Good is boring in the best way: no marquee anywhere in the codebase, motion used sparingly and only where it earns its place, every animation pausable, and reduced-motion users served a still version by default. Your HTML validates without obsolete-element warnings, and the page reads as maintained rather than mothballed.
FAQ
Will removing marquees directly raise my rankings?
The browser still shows my marquee. Why change it?
I really do need scrolling text. What now?
@keyframes and transform: translateX(), add a pause control, and wrap it in a prefers-reduced-motion query so it stops for users who asked for less motion.How do I find all of them fast?
<marquee, or grep your theme and template files. Most sites have one shared component to fix rather than dozens of separate pages.Obsolete tags like marquee usually travel in packs with other technical debt. An advanced audit finds every instance and the templates feeding them.
Claude Vincent is a technical SEO consultant focused on crawlability, rendering, and AI-search visibility. He writes the field guides and case studies at SEO ProCheck, with a bias toward the durable, unglamorous work that decides whether search engines and AI answer engines can actually read and cite a site.
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