Cre8tive Flow

It’s rare that a day goes by when somebody asks me a question, either about SEO or Accessibility, which doesn’t in some way require me to answer that “it depends.”

Sometimes, this comes across as a surprise: aren’t there guidelines which are supposed to regulate these things? Yes, there are. And, if people were to ask me “Does doing this comply with Google’s webmaster guidelines?” or “Will this be in compliance with the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 1?” then I could generally answer definitely one way or the other.

Google officially stated the other day that they’ll be crawling through HTML forms. It’s an interesting move — their stated goal is to increase their coverage of the web by adding this new aspect to their crawling. I’ll note right away that this is not an immediate general addition to their crawling practices:

Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment, and our crawl agent, the ever-friendly Googlebot, always adheres to robots.txt, nofollow, and noindex directives. Google Webmaster Central Blog