Google To Soon Index Enquiry Forms On A Website

With thousands of internet sites being developed day by day, Google is also becoming increasingly sophisticated in its indexing techniques to soon add in indexing AJAX based submission forms. Google experimented on indexing html GET and POST forms ever since 2008 and is soon looking into crawling AJAX based submission forms in a bid to safely surface other information for web users.

Now let us go two steps back and sort out these submission forms, taking the point of view of web site owner and the common website user. Submission forms are the important forms on a website whereby a website user can either ask for data (as in subscription, etc.) or buy a product, save data, or send out an e-mail. GET forms, as the name suggests, are solely used for retrieving data. POST forms deal with commands.

The peculiarity matters because if the web site owner makes use of the incorrect form, then there can be undesirable consequences. For instance, worldwide web users who would typically hit the reload or resend button while waiting for a POST form to be completely processed in all likelihood will process the POST form twice. If this was a POST form for purchasing pizza, then two orders will be prepared instead of one. Or a credit card will be charged twice. The transaction can get muddled up.

Now with our awareness on HTML form and of the fundamental differences between a GET and a POST form, let us now revisit Google’s indexing or crawling of forms. According to Google Webmaster Central Blog, with the rising popularity of JavaScript and with it, AJAX, they are discovering more web pages requiring POST requests, either for entire web page or for some data which are missing on a page. As a consequence of this, Google is planning on indexing POST forms so users can have access to the most pertinent and complete search results.

Google reiterates that it still prefers to crawl GET forms but it has to crawl POST forms so no data is hidden to worldwide web users.

SEO wise this offers another way for web sites to make it to the frontpage of Google. To make your POST form crawlable, Google recommends that you switch your JavaScript code to allow Googlebot to crawl it. You should also stay away from cloaking on your site. Cloaking is offering the Googlebot a different search results from the result that your site will actually show your visitors and as such, cloaking is a direct infringement of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. And finally, Google still indexes text content over any other element in a website. POST forms is just an additional element, but the chief element Google indexes is text content.

Click web design or SEO for more information on how to code AJAX based submission forms that Google will index. (8675)