Does Google follow Buttons/Inputs

Question

Does google follow buttons and form inputs when crawling websites? I'm adding rel="nofollow" tags to links I don't want google to follow but I'm not sure if I need to add them to buttons.

For example an 'add to cart' button.

Thanks

Amary

Answer 1

Generally, no. Especially not POST-based forms; POST may have side-effects per the RFC, while GET is defined as a "safe" method. Google is experimenting with some "deep web" spidering, however, so it's possible that they may request GET-based forms -- but this isn't yet commonplace, as far as I know.

But according to the standards, spiders should not POST.

In fact, the original announcement from google states that they only follow GET-based forms.

Provisional

Answer 2

Your "add to cart" button should either POST a form, or execute JavaScript. Google won't do either of those two things.

Sardius

+1 thanks, this is exactly my issue, crazy Googlebot is follwoing all my "add to cart" GET form by indexing thousands of useless pages. I'm gonna set form action using Javascript, hope it works. – Intoxicate

Answer 3

hi bots don't submit post requests of any kind.

google does follow rel=nofollow links, it just doesn't assume that you are 'vouching' for the content to which they link

Stout

To add to the nofollow note, not only does google follow nofollow links, but it may also include those URLs in the index, without any sort of metadata (title, description); robots.txt excluded URLs behave similarly. If you want google to omit the page from the index entirely, you need to use the noindex tag. mattcutts.com/blog/bot-obedience-herding-googlebot/… – Provisional