: Google follows disabled options on "get" forms I have the following get form on my website for language switching. <form method="get" action="?"> <label for="language">Language: </label>
I have the following get form on my website for language switching.
<form method="get" action="?">
<label for="language">Language: </label>
<select id="language" name="lang">
<option disabled="disabled" value="es">Espanol</option>
<option disabled="disabled" value="da">Dansk</option>
<option value="de">Deutsch</option>
<option value="en">English</option>
<option disabled="disabled" value="fr">Francais</option>
<option disabled="disabled" value="it">Italiano</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" value="GO">
</form>
This constructs URLs of the form /?lang=en and note that currently my site only has the following URLs available:
/?lang=en
/?lang=de
Visiting anything else (e.g. /?lang=fr) returns a 404 so Google does not index them.
What is a problem though is that the Google Webmaster Tools shows all disabled languages as broken links even though I've marked them with disabled="disabled".
I want to stop Google from trying to visit those links but I cannot use rel="nofollow" on those disabled options because I don't think that rel is a valid attribute of <option />. What should I do?
Note that I don't want to remove the disabled options from the form.
More posts by @Cugini213
3 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
Google will keep reporting the 404 pages in Webmaster Tools whilst the links are found on your site. This is normal. If you changed them to 410 status pages then they will still be reported in Webmaster Tools. You can mark the crawl errors as 'Fixed', but they will probably show up again if the links are still on your site. If you blocked them by robots.txt then you would find mention of URLs blocked by robots.txt in the Index Status section.
The 404 reports in Webmaster Tools are not harming your site, it is just Google reporting what has been found during crawling.
If the option is disabled, then it shouldn't matter what the value is, since real users can't actually choose it. Just remove the value from those options while they are disabled to prevent Googlebot from crawling:
<option disabled="disabled" value="">Francais</option>
Whatever you marked options disabled, Googlebot follows links and finds links to 404 HTTP status. That's why Google reports 404 error pages on Google Webmaster Tools.
If you don't want Googlebot crawls these URLs, you can block them in robots.txt.
And if you want remove 404 error pages on Google Webmaster Tools, you can mark these URL as 410 HTTP status with .htaccess (if your webserver is Apache). It takes time but Google will remove them from 404 error pages.
Terms of Use Create Support ticket Your support tickets Stock Market News! © vmapp.org2024 All Rights reserved.