MMMeeja

Oh my, what a brouhaha in the SEO community over the announcement that Googlebot can fill in forms!

Nobody should be surprised at this. Thanks to the experiments of SEOs and Matt Cutts we know quite a bit about Googlebot’s behaviour.

What Do We Know About Googlebot?

We know that Googlebot is pretty damn clever - it’s been working hard to separate the spam from the bacon for years and is part of Google’s core product.

We know that Google checks whether you are serving different content to Googlebot and human surfers - presumably by using a different user agent string.

We know that Googlebot will index NOINDEX pages, if it thinks that human searchers would benefit. We know that Googlebot can sometimes ignore a robots.txt directive in its eternal hunt to expose blackhats and spammers.

Googlebot is clever. Its programmers are clever and they are waging a battle against people who want to sell you unregulated medicine when you’re searching for Britney Spears latest single.

I wholeheartedly support Googlebot being clever and bending the rules sometimes, so long as the end goal is to provide human searchers with the information they seek.

What Don’t We Know About Googlebot?

There are a couple of technologies that might be used by Googlebot to some extent but not be publicised:

• Cookies - Googlebot might be able to store and provide cookies. Hardly a difficult coding problem.
• Javascript - Some basic javascript interpretation might be used in Googlebot. Nothing super-fancy, but it could determine whether a page’s text is hidden after loading and replaced with adverts for unsavoury products.

Both these techniques are useful to catch blackhats but should have little effect on organic search results for legitimate sites.

The Bottom Line

Don’t sweat the form filling. Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) know about blogs and search pages and do not want to lower the quality of their search results by including the results of filling a search form with random words. As Matt said in his post, the form-filling technique is used sparingly and carefully and I believe him.

The technique is not meant to penalise anyone, it’s about improving Google’s search results. If your site goes down in the rankings as a result, I will be very surprised.

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Photos by jenn_jenn and peyri