Block Googlebot from submit button

[Olivier_Lambert]

Hi,

I have a website where many searches are made by the googlebot on our internal engine. We can make noindex on result page, but we want to stop the bot to call the ajax search button - GET form (because it pass a request to an external API with associate fees).

So, we want to stop crawling the form button, without noindex the search page itself. The "nofollow" tag don't seems to apply on button's submit.

Any suggestion?

[iPullRank]

Hey Olivier,

You could detect the user agent and hide the button. The difference isn't substantial enough to be called cloaking.

Or you could make the button not actually a button tag, but another tag with that traps clicks with a JS event. I'm not sure Google's headless browser is smart enough to automate that. I would try this first and if it doesn't work switch to the user agent detection idea.

Let us know how it goes!

-Mike

[Olivier_Lambert]

http://varvacations.com/

[GPainter]

Can always do it in a programme the bot's can't use or hide it behind a log in field etc.

I also give you the following for consumption :

http://moz.com/blog/12-ways-to-keep-your-content-hidden-from-the-search-engines

Good luck!

[crackingmedia]

Hi Bernard

Are you able to provide a link to the web form containing the submit button?

Peter