Forms on websites have always been a problem whether it is coding, execution, or the fact that it was a wall to spiders. I would say that in my 10 years of coding, html forms have been the biggest problem in web site design. From the start forms were created using odd execution triggers; you could use CGI, Java, and the always dangerous Microsoft Front Page extensions. Today we use a number of other functions, php, asp, and flash to improve the delivery of the information. Internet data is now mission critical, so the old form techniques are out - mostly due to security and mail delivery problems.

For Google search, or any spiders for that matter, forms were the end of the road, spiders could not follow. Spiders could not follow the destinations of the forms. Many times forms just go to a “Thank You page”, but sometime they unlock whole sections of content that would not be indexed in the search engines. Other navigation solutions used “jump menus” which are usually coded as forms, so none of your jump menu content was found by the engines.

Google has announced that is now experimenting with the ability to search, from “Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Crawling through HTML forms”

“In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a <FORM> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form” - Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy, Crawling and Indexing Team.

RedFusion Media has always placed high value on “Google-able” search pages, and if you would like to learn more about how Google works, and how search engine optimization works.