Google Blogoscoped

Forum

Google NOW Crawls Forms & Dropdowns  (View post)

* Miss UNIVERSE [PersonRank 7]

Friday, April 11, 2008
16 years ago6,047 views


However, it is only for a small number of 'high quality sites'

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/solved-another-common-site-review-problem/

Uri Lederman [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

I was under the impression that they always did???

I mean, as long as the dropdown takes you somewhere??

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

* Miss UNIVERSE, previously known as Search-Engines-Web.com?

Above 3 comments were made in the forum before this was blogged,

/pd [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

another way to pollute the index.. think of a nice legit looking site with the drop downs being sent to a host of urls that a hosts spam type of porn sites..

"it’s less about crawling search results and more about discovering new links."

likewise its good tool for SEO/SEM to "abuse" this feature too..

Mambo [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

<< I mean, as long as the dropdown takes you somewhere?? >>

That's more of a JS issue, rather than a form. You could use an onchange to make the drop-down menu do something once it has been selected.

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Google understands JavaScript since many years ago. Googlebot is able to read URL, even exploded in different variables, in javascript code. Many studies have shown that.

Submitting forms is just the following step.

Zim [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I thought they were already doing this. When you search for some terms, you find spammy results. Say... "wav encoder". You get many results. One of the first I get is from a page called brothersoft.
http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/8018/spammtx6.jpg
If you look, it says "Software Search For wav encoder"
I've seen results like this since a lot of time.
Off-Topic: I tried (but failed) to do a custom search avoiding this kind of sites (like softpedia and other sites I really hate). If someone has ideas to create something like this, please tell me!

Eugene Villar [PersonRank 5]

16 years ago #

[put at-character here]Zim, it could be spam, or then again, it could be someone just doing a direct link to the search results page that are not robot excluded.

Alex [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

There is a lot of data hidden behind query forms. For example the addresses of UK train stations, time tables and other such stuff.

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

<<it could be someone just doing a direct link to the search results page>>

Look at the links from the top of the Brothersoft page and the list of related searches.

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Google is only crawling "GET" forms. That makes sense. A "GET" form is likely to lead to an indexable page, whereas a "POST" form is likely to be carrying out some action before displaying the results of that action.

On the other hand, if a site publishes a sitemap, there should be no reason for Google to submit forms, because the sitemap should lead to all the pages that the site wants crawled.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

> Google understands JavaScript since many years ago.

Thanks Tom for the correction. I updated the article.

Forum home

Advertisement

 
Blog  |  Forum     more >> Archive | Feed | Google's blogs | About
Advertisement

 

This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!