Googlebot Requesting Non-Existent Form Actions?

[mrjohncory]

Apologies if this is something obvious but it's got us stumped:

Programmer noticed today that Googlebot was triggering his 404 tripwires by requesting weird form actions on one of our lead generation forms.

http://www.example.com/formAction.cfm?action=contact=lMjj5ZQe8ahL6Eu&Zip=iaimrGvLSsJSuNjVYI5RfJvckRneTX&etc=...

Where there are all those jumbles of numbers and letters there would typically be something like "United States" or "California" or a zip code, etc, provided by someone filling out the form and moving along to a listing of results defined by their provided info.

Looks like it's testing the form or something?

The programmer tried a reverse DNS lookup and it appears to be a real Google Googlebot/2.1 from 66.249.65.67.

Doesn't make sense to us though. Programmer says it's hitting us once or twice a day.

If this is a real Googlebot, how'd it get on this kick ... or why?
If it's somehow not Google, anybody have an idea what the mission is?

[Solution1]

I don't have answers to your questions, however I have for a couple of years been reckoning with the possibility that search engine spiders may be filling in forms in some way.

I put a robots meta tag in the result page (noarchive, noindex), and in some instances I check for Javascript by having a function on onsubmit set some hidden input.

[mrjohncory]

Thanks S1,

Yeah, this particular issue doesn't seem like an immediate concern but do most folks put "noindex,nofollow" boundaries up around forms?

Seems to me like it might be good practice, kind of like putting up one of those plastic baby gates if you have dogs . . . or babies.