Will google submit form?

Hi there

I have a gallery that uses forms with hidden elements to pass data from page to page. Basically the entire gallery is in one file - index.php

I can't post link but to see site please go to Swinburne Uni Australia Faculty of Design and click on gallery

On that page you will see a 'View all' button down the bottom. This is a form submit button that reloads the page sending some vars stored in hidden form elements. Would google submit that form and index the data on the next page? I have implemented mod rewrite to get nice urls for every piece in the gallery (click view on any piece to see) but this is not much use if google does not submit forms when indexing sites

Thanks in advance

I think it's doubtfull that google will see the rest of your page (by submitting the form)
Even if google submits the form, the page would still be index.php (this could give some problems).
If you are using a url like this: "index.php?id=2", Google will probably index the page but won't index it as fast as a normal formed url (like "/index/2/").

Hope this helps,

Isuwyn

it does help

Thanks

G can submit basic forms.
Under no circumstances relie on this though.

Create a html and a XML site map with links to all the pages you want in the results. Make sure the link to the page is on an indexed page and G will get all your content that way, by passing the form and the variables.

Jaza

yes the xml sitemap is definitely on the to-do list. For now though, I just rescripted the gallery to use dynamic html links to each piece rather than form submit buttons. Got some pretty wacky urls happening because I am including all the form data (that used to be hidden) in the URL

eg

Student-Michel-Yates--CALL--YALL--LALL--SearchWords-Enter-Keywords--SearchMethod-dropdowns--Adetail--P254.html

Looks like crap but if it makes google happy then I'm not too fussed

Thanks again

You might consider submitting a sitemap to Google...this will give them a list of URLs to crawl...

Google Webmaster information

You can do it straight from your robots.txt that way they get it on the next visit and will save you time submitting every time you add or delete pages.

Thats a nice stop gap depending on how long it took you to create it and if no indexed page's URL's have changed.

A HTML site map dynamically should take minutes to create, and give you the same results. Indexed pages.

Jaza

If your site is similar to AJAX then google will find it difficult to crawl

However you can post the url in format www dot my website dot com. I dont think anybody will have issues with it

thanks all

It didn't take too long to overhaul the page to use URLS like the one above instead of posted data. Regarding that URL, would google penalise it at all due to its length? It may seem as though I am trying to keyword stuff the URL ...


The gallery can be viewed at swin dot edu dot au / design / gallery

Thanks again

No it shouldn't be an issue.
Cant you lower the case and remove the double hyphens and make it a directory structure?

It would be more user friendly that way.
It looks ugly to be honest.

Jaza

hehe I agree. I was originally doing it as directories but was having path issues with my includes (I think) so I gave up and did it that way. I'll try again...

Thanks

Hay this may help with the includes -

If the re-written dir is 3 levels deep you need to go back 3 levels, regardless of your actual file structure, to reference the actual file.

So your re-written url:
yoursite/dir/dir/pageWithIncludes

and your includes are in

yoursite/includes

to get them to work should be -

include("../../../includeFile");

if not try it with just 2.

or use the HTML base as that works for includes, from what I noticed.

Then it's the file relevant to the base URL you specify.

Jaza

OK I will try HTML base. I tried dirname(__FILE__) the other night and was having issues

Thanks again

The above is good/ Alternatively, use "robots.txt" to exclude whole directories or files. Search these forums for details of how to use it.