When a URL is made for any online form, functions are encoded to ensure the data will be sent and submitted. The form in a URL also defines what will happen to the data once you submit a form. Generally, by looking at the locator, one can determine which characteristics or page it’s representing. You can watch a video by Daniel Waisberg from Google about how URLs are inspected.
If you plan to have forms on your website, it’s best to learn about form-data, primarily through the GET method. On the other hand, if you’re interested in what happens to the actual data after submitting the form, you can read through this explanation.
What Does “Form GET in URL” Mean?
Form GET means that the URL contains a form-data function and is done through the GET method. The form-data defines the data a user inputs in a specific form. The GET method is one of the HTML <form> methods.
The form elements in this method retrieve documents. It’s used to ask servers to send back a particular resource. Once the form is sent, the data will be appended to the URL and retrieved in this method. A form-data done through GET is suitable for form submissions where users want to bookmark the results.
What Triggers This Issue?
The GET method retrieves data submitted using a URL string and is only triggered if it’s encoded in an internal URL. Once the value of GET is specified, the browser will add the form’s contents to the end of the URL.
For example, a user enters https://www.sample.com/abc/file2.htm. Since the GET method is encoded and used, the URL will become a valid HTTP GET request like GET/abc/file2.htm HTTP/1.0. The request will be transferred to the server of the webpage and asks for file2.htm in the ABC directory.
Once the user passes or submits the form, the information will be appended to the URL. This will result in a new one: http://www.sample.com/cgi-x/comments.exe?Name=AI+Mark&Age=21&Gender=male.
How To Check the Issue
Based on the example above, you can check for form GET in URLs by inspecting them yourself. But for better results, you can use tools that will alert you if an internal URL contains GET in the HTML.
In the ‘Indexability’ section of our Site Audit, there’s an important callout for URLs containing forms with a GET method. This specific finding could be a cause for concern, as using GET methods in forms can lead to URLs that are unwieldy or that can be indexed when you might not want them to be.
Clicking on ‘View issue’ provides a straightforward list of URLs where forms are using GET methods—something that might inadvertently affect your site’s performance in search results. For each URL, we offer key insights like page weight, status codes, and the date the issue was detected, giving you clear indicators of what might need immediate attention.
Understanding the context in which these forms appear and how they can impact your SEO is crucial. Our Sitechecker tool simplifies this process, making it easier for you to pinpoint and address these nuances effectively, ensuring your site remains optimized and user-friendly.
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Why Is This Important?
Since data is in the URL with this method, it can cause some disadvantages in terms of SEO. This cannot be good because the URLs can be cached and directly accessed by anyone who knows it. Also, there’s a possibility of generating infinite unique links if no restrictions are set on the fields.
How To Fix the Issue
Since there are GET disadvantages, you can opt to use the POST method instead to fix the issues mentioned above. The POST method appends the data in the body rather than in the URL. But, if you really need to use GET, make sure to block search crawlers from crawling the form action URL using robot.txt.
