GoogleBot and Forms

Is the bot that sneaky?

[giggle]

I have a page that requires that the user selects certain date/location parameters before clicking on the submit button to continue.

Will the GoogleBot stop at that page or will it automatically select parameters to move on and index the deeper pages?

Thanks.

[cyberprosper]

I think Googlebot will likely choose California location/time data and follow the links, but it may depend on the data center location and not where the company is. Usually, I am very careful with my forms. For example, I think Google is male, so I try to cloak male/female options on my pages so Googlebot does not choose wrong... I think this would fall under "legitimate" cloaking, wouldn't it?

[Stark]

Surely googlebot will not submit forms? That would cause chaos wouldn't it?

[BigDave]

I would not be surprised if Google were to play with submitting very simple forms. There would not be that much work to follow a single set of radio buttons.

One you start getting to multiple variables, or text entry options it isn't going to follow those.

[bluelightning2k]

Google won't ever follow forms. This is simple common sense. Unless, of course, it could read the context 100%, and that sort of AI is a long way off.

The simple reason... Forms on the internet can do anything from register somewhere to rateing a service to requesting a quote.

You could even have Googlebot making purchases by accident, it would be chaos.

[ExpLarry]

You could even have Googlebot making purchases by accident, it would be chaos.

As it happens, the Googlebot is one of my best customers, it regularly orders large consignments of diode pain relievers to be shipped to an address in Santa Monica ;-).

Seriously though, has anyone ever observer the bot following the address in a <form> tag? I'm tempted to run an experiment.

[BigDave]

I have seen claims here from people who seem to think that it followed a form, but I suspect that it was due to a link from some other site that included the variables.

[kaled]

Why exactly would you instruct a robot to follow form links? It's going to be pointless (I'm guessing here) 99% of the time.

However, I am certain that the toolbar is responsible for certain urls being indexed. If the url is that of a form action, it may appear that Googlebot has followed the form. It is for this reason, that I would say putting a NOINDEX robots meta on form action pages is to be recommended. Indeed, I have done exactly that on some Perl code I'll be uploading in the next day or so.

Kaled.

[graywolf]

Google won't ever follow forms. This is simple common sense. Unless, of course, it could read the context 100%, and that sort of AI is a long way off.

I use r*boform and it pretty darn good at figuring out how to fill in forms. You can even customize it so it's 'smarter than the average bear'. If something like that can be developed on the outside, I have to imagine the PhD's at the plex are at least that smart.