Tell us what you are trying to do?
I have been told that if fields are not filled in on a form / post and it is left empty because its irrelevant to that user, when search engines spider your page if it sees empty boxes it lowers your ranking.
An example of this would be models filling out their sizes and measurements. On a form it might ask chest, waist, hips. But a man would not fill the hips box as its irrelevant. Is this true and is there a way around this.
Thanks
Jay
Hi Jay,
Thank you for contacting us and I'd be happy to assist.
Based on some research online, I was able to find no concrete references about how the search engines crawl the forms and how it can affect the rankings. There is some indication that Google's crawlers are possibly able to use the search forms to reach the search results, but, there is no mention about whether they can also process the forms which collect the data from visitors, like contact request forms or the content/post creation forms.
Considering the goal of search engines is to index information available from the websites, it doesn't make much sense that they evaluate the input form fields which are there to collect and not show the information.
As for displaying the fields on your templates, you can choose to only show the fields which have some value, using the conditional display.
I hope this helps and please let me know if you need any further assistance around this.
regards,
Waqar
Sorry I did mean on the table / page created once a form is submitted / approved, not the form filling stage.
As for displaying the fields on your templates, you can choose to only show the fields which have some value, using the conditional display.
Does this mean a spider won't see it as an empty field?
Thanks for your assistance.
Jay
Thanks for writing back and your understanding is correct.
Any content that is shown conditionally, will be available for visitors and search engine crawlers alike, only when the condition is met.
Thanks Waqar, thats really clear now.
Jay
My issue is resolved now. Thank you!
