How to stop search engines spidering a form?

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How to stop search engines spidering a form?

IsItUPYet

9:12 am on Sep 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

I am working on a site which uses a contact form on every page on the form there is a drop down menu so people can select the country they are currently a resident in. The search engines has recently spidered the form and the countries in the drop down menu and this has caused the site to come under things like blue widgets Austria, blue widgets spain etc. The company in question only offers its services to certain areas based in the north east of England and so we don’t want to be found for search terms such as blue widgets Austria.

Is there some way we could stop the spiders reading the form or the drop down menu? I was considering placing the form into an object tag so the search engines cannot spider the forms but would this cause the search engines to see this as hidden and punish my site with lower rankings?

Robin_reala

9:36 am on Sep 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

Add the URL of the page to your robots.txt?

piatkow

10:11 am on Sep 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

Do you mean that the code for the form is hard coded on every single page or do you use some other technique to insert it?

penders

10:18 am on Sep 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

Is there some way we could stop the spiders reading the form or the drop down menu? I was considering placing the form into an object tag so the search engines cannot spider the forms but would this cause the search engines to see this as hidden and punish my site with lower rankings?

I was going to suggest using JavaScript to write your form (or part of) - search engines will tend not to execute it and therefore not index it. I guess this is the idea behind using <object>. I don't know of search engines punishing sites for the use of JS (well, you don't want it to index that part anyway) - I don't know about <object> tags?

Although in using JS (objects as well maybe?) your accessibility could decrease?!

kaled

12:08 pm on Sep 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

What's needed is a robots attribute for elements like <div>, however the only way you can solve this problem (without cloaking) is to place the form in an <iframe> and exclude robots from it.

A common misconception with <iframe> is that it must have visible borders and scrollbars, but its borders can be invisible. The only real problem is that the <iframe> will not be sized vertically according to content requirements therefore you may need to place it at the bottom of the page.

Kaled.