Do form action links help?

form action

[m_leefs]

I know google follows regular links and uses those to rank sites, but does the google spider follow form action links like:
<form action="http://www.somesite.com>

[MHes]

Hi

Gut feeling - Yes, but carries no pr. Just had a quick look around and pages connected by a form are known by google but with no pr.

[ThomasB]

GB follows almost everything that looks like a URL if it's able to access it.

[MikeBeverley]

GB follows almost everything that looks like a URL if it's able to access it.

Agreed. If you form link leads to a .php page or .js script or anything that is not indexable though ti won't make any difference. What are you planning to put in the form 'links' anyway?

[m_leefs]

The form gets sent to www.somepage.com/search.php?$s=somevariable&$t=someothervariable which then redirects to other pages. So are you saying that since GB doesn't index the php?$blah=blahblahblah pages it won't even matter? It doesn't matter if GB indexes the search.php page?

[BigDave]

It might try and check out the URI, but that would be about it. And I'm not betting on that.

The problem is that results pages will generally be vastly different depending on what was entered into the form.

But a lot of people do put up <a href> links to certain forms results pages that they find interesting. With this sort of link, it can appear that Google has followed a form link, when in fact they have not.

[elmarpanzenberger]

Agree with ThomasB & MikeBeverley
Google follows everything that might look like an URL.
It definitively follows even ASP-lines as
<% Server.Execute("whatever.asp") %> and it spiders them.
BTW it does spider those sites even if they are in an excluded dir by robots.txt and METAS. It does include them in the index but only with their URL.

[MikeBeverley]

Remember, what we're saying is that Google follows the link in the form, it DOESN'T FILL IN THE FORM. So if the form had

<form action=www.somepage.com/search.php ...>

Google would go to:

www.somepage.com/search.php

It would not have entered 'somevariable' 'someothervariable' to create the string. HOWEVER - if someone fills in the form, click submit and they have the Google toolbar, the Google Toolbar will register the URL that the user reaches:

www.somepage.com/search.php?$s=somevariable&$t=someothervariable

And therefore that page could very well end up in the Google index. There are millions of spammy search results pages in the Google index already (many do it on purpose). Hopefully Google will find a way to eliminate them.

[whiterabbit]

It definitively follows even ASP-lines as
<% Server.Execute("whatever.asp") %> and it spiders them.

asp: <% Server.Execute("whatever.asp") %>
html: whatever.asp

the bot would never 'see' that code, asp being server-side and all that, so, the html created by asp would be spidered, but not the asp code itself.

if a googlebot can 'read' asp code, I want one as a pet!

[elmarpanzenberger]

I know, but it is a fact that i have this pages spidered even if the only reference to them is the above server side execut.
Seems like when the page is executed it is spidered - could depend on the G toolbar.

[whiterabbit]

<% Server.Execute("whatever.asp") %>

The content of the whatever.asp is spidered, but, the pagename is the original calling page, whatever.asp will not show up in any SERP. It can't because the calling page returns a 200 header.

Tony

edit: I think they used to be (and maybe still are) called doorway pages

[elmarpanzenberger]

agree, not to find in the SERPS, but a site: search shows the page, otherwhise i wouldn't even know.

BTW no doorway page but a traffc tracker :-)