Don’t use “POST” forms if you wanna get crawled

… not exactly, you’ll still be crawled, but for in-depth indexing, maybe not so much.

Check out the newest post from Google Blogoscoped,“Googlebot Submitting Forms to Find More Pages” and the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog post as well.

Google notes that they only do this form submission for “GET” forms. A form using GET results in a parametrized URL like example.com/show?foo=bar. The guidelines for webmasters are that a GET request should never actually change data on the server, like trigger a user registraton or something; for such things, webmasters should use POST, which the Googlebot will not submit. Google also note that they “omit any forms that have a password input or that use terms commonly associated with personal information such as logins, userids, contacts, etc.” Plus, Google say that pages they find will not reduce the PageRank of other pages on the site.

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