Q: Are scrolling banners good to use on web sites?

A: This is a bit of a controversy in the web development industry. The inquiry is about how a scrolling javascript banner will effect the placement of a site on the search engine results.

First of all, I know it 'looks cool' but the scrolling only allows people to see a small part of the message you would like to get across to people. The nature of the web is instant access... allowing your guests more control over their web browsing experience. The scrolling banner removes their control of their own experience. Very few people will wait for that whole message to move across the window in order to see the whole message.

This means that of the message that may be so important, most people will not wait around and will only read a small part of the message if it is too long. Personally, when browsing on the Internet, I seldom take the time to wait for everything in a scrolling banner to read the whole thing.

Another reason I don't link this type of feature is that it can be considered poor programming design. Text in those banners typically will have ZERO effect on your web placement on Google and Yahoo. So all those great keywords you may plan to put in there do ZERO good on the Internet to get you more traffic. A simpler stationary box can drastically increase placement.

For example, we have a site that uses scrolling banners. When looking at Google's PageRank, it has always had a very difficult time gaining ground. A budget has been set up for additional advertising, but it has little effect on the traffic to the site. Another site that has never spent a penny on advertising that is in a much larger industry with 100s of times more competitors uses simple text changes and has repeatedly found itself at or near the top of the search results for popular search terms. The same work is done by the web master on both, the second site has out performed the first without exception.

Another one of the reasons I do not like to use these types of
banners is that peoples browsers get updated from time to time.. There will typically be an upgrade that will 'knock the script out of service'. If the next update of Internet Explorer does not fix it, we will have to go reprogram the whole thing if you wish to use that feature on your site.

Expensive to maintain and all that work for nothing. It boils down to that.