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How To Make Googlebot Index Your AJAX Based Submission Forms

By Jacob Walker


The use of the web becomes increasingly complex day by day, with thousands of web sites being developed using diverse platforms. As a consequence of this, Google is also expanding ways it can crawl or index numerous sites, including indexing AJAX based forms. Submission forms are unlikely sources of text content, but Google has been experimenting with indexing it since 2008 beginning with the html GET and POST forms.

Just going back two steps, let's understand what these forms are from the point of view of the non-techie website owner and the regular website visitor. Submission forms are also identified as contact forms, buy forms, or enquiry forms depending on what action or command these forms render. GET forms, as the name indicates, solely retrieve information. While POST forms do a next level action, such as purchasing a product, saving data, or sending an e-mail,

Website owners will do well keeping the awareness on the distinction between GET and POST forms so as to keep away from unfavourable consequences from mixing the use of these forms. For example, a buyer orders pizza and hits the resend button two times on a POST form. This can possibly result in purchasing twice instead of once. This can be the same situation when using the credit card for online transactions.

Now with our understanding on HTML form and of the essential differences between a GET and a POST form, let us now revert to Google's indexing or crawling of forms. According to Google Webmaster Central Blog, with the growing popularity of JavaScript and with it, AJAX, they are discovering more worldwide web pages requiring POST requests, either for entire worldwide 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 visitors can have access to the most relevant and complete search results.

Google was quick to add a disclaimer that it will no more than crawl POST forms when it is secure and fitting, and when surfacing data on the worldwide web will be helpful to the searchers. Google still favours indexing the GET forms.

How does this impact SEO? Well, it opens an additional avenue for a website to land on the first page of Google. How do you put up your POST submission form to be crawlable? Google suggests that you toggle your JavaScript code to allow Googlebot to crawl the form. Moreover, do not cloak your results. Cloaking is a direct violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. You should display to Googlebot the matching results that you would display your visitors. In conclusion, content is still king with Google. Text article that is SEO focused is still the number one part on your website which Google indexes.




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