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YK1175434

: Does Google submit HTML forms? I have a web page, say http://domain/purchase and in this page, I have a web form. User, on submitting this form (which has validation, both client-side and server

@YK1175434

Posted in: #Google #Indexing #SearchEngines

I have a web page, say domain/purchase and in this page, I have a web form. User, on submitting this form (which has validation, both client-side and server side and won't be validated until fields are filled appropriately), would be redirected to another page, where (s)he can choose other things, and specify other settings and then purchase our product. Say the second page is domain/options.
So, user comes to our site and visits domain/purchase, fills the form, submits it, and then would be redirected to the second page, doamin/options?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2, which contains parameters from the first page. This is very common in passing parameters between web pages (or technically, between URLs).

Now I was reviewing my website, and saw that Google had indexed some of my redirected web pages and URLs, like:

domain/options?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2 http://domain/options?parameter1=value3&parameter2=value4 domain/options?parameter1=value5&parameter2=value6 http://domain/options?parameter1=value7&parameter2=value8 domain/options?parameter1=value9&parameter2=value10

This means that Google Bot has visited our domain/purchase page, and has filled our form, and has submitted it, and was being redirected to the other URL, with corresponding parameters. This is the only way that makes sense to me. Does Google really fills forms?

PS: All parameters are meaningful, meaning that they are not filled arbitrarily. For example, the phone parameter in indexed pages has correct phone numbers. How is it possible?

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@Pope3001725

Google is getting more aggressive when it comes to submitting forms.

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@Ravi8258870

Google has been able to crawl HTML forms since 2008.


Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. 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 much as we would include any other web page.


On the other hand, since it's unlikely that GoogleBot knows the correct parameters to put into those fields, there may be another explanation. Is it possible that your users are linking to the redirected pages?

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