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Avatar Went Hot: April 11, 2008 - 8:48 pm
Posted By: jeffquipp 147 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://searchengineland.com)
Category: Google SEO
Wow ... this is a big announcement. Previously, Google was not able to get past simple forms, but now it can. Great development.
13 Comments     

Comments

from MarkBarrera 147 days ago #
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Wow - this has lots of implications.  Looks like everyone should take a good look at their robots.txt and make sure Google doesn't go crazy indexing your site.

from Gab 147 days ago #
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Mark, Google's doing this in a limited fashion. You can do a site:seoroi.com or site:brianchappell.com search for examples. Here's the official Google quote:
"We are also mindful of the impact we can have on web sites and limit ourselves to a very small number of fetches for a given site."



If you'd rather not have it at all, I believe that Mike vanDeMar (smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com) will be sharing his code as to how to block this dynamically - it's a pretty smart solution.

Also, my apologies to Google for falsely accusing them of leaking Google Analytics data into the index.

from Gab 147 days ago #
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Also, here's Matt's announcement on the issue: http://sphinn.com/story/40122

from webmama 147 days ago #
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Seriously this is scary. From an SEO point of view it is unnecessary - if the site owner wants stuff indexed they should make it available. From all other points of view I see this as a real problem.

1. Marketing uses forms all the time to capture lead information. And they measure it. Let's say Google tries to 'fill out' the form and get to the inside information once a day for a month. That is 30 hits on the form that were completed but did not convert. Kind of messes with the data.

2. No matter what they say would you, as a security/risk manager, be satisfied that Google isn't going to try and 'guess' the login or password just because the button or form element has something familiar on it like 'password'. A lot of personal information (aka healthcare) and business information (aka intranet access) lie behind forms.

3. What if the form is about gathering demograhpic information. I am not sure that the demographics of a search engine or the demographics of some bot with keywords that are randomly chosen is information an advertiser is trying to capture.

So now we get GoogleBot instead of Donald Duck as the false name on our forms.

Bad News.

from mercylivi 147 days ago #
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Its a very good improvemnet.

from RealitySEO 146 days ago #
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Way too many qualifiers there to count on it happening and hope for useful crawls of important pages, rather than converting to CSS dropdowns to replace the forms fields you want crawled.

… Here are some excerpts from the Google Blog post:

... when we encounter a element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form...
... If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index ...
... Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment, and our crawl agent ...
... limit ourselves to a very small number of fetches for a given site...

Seriously, with all of those qualifiers, it almost sounds as though it would affect only a handful of sites at best.

from copywriter39 146 days ago #
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I'm curious is this means we should eventually look at optimizing our forms. Not to get carried away and turn our forms into spam. But perhaps to write "I'm interested in your SEO work" instead of just writing, "I'm interested in your services."

from itravin 146 days ago #
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On the face of it as a search engine user I might appreciate it.. but it sort of seems unnecessary .. it is not innovative in the larger sense of the word..

from mvandemar 146 days ago #
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itravin... what, you mean like innovative..?

from iBrian 146 days ago #
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Sounds like this explains how Google's been indexing Wordpress search results.

from johnandrews 146 days ago #
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it's just another autobot so if you don't want to accept auto-submitted forms add a form field and hide it from users via CSS. If it comes in completed, trust it's a bot and should not be accepted (or better, should be answered with the apprpriate response, whatever your SEO brain decides that response should be).

from schuilr 144 days ago #
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One of the websites where Google does this is Lyrics.net, owned by one of my coworkers. I have published some findings on my blog:
http://www.lunchpauze.com/2008/04/googlebot-wtf-are-you-doing.html

from MattCutts 144 days ago #
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iBrian, I think that's the explanation for several sites, yes.


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