Can my forms be found on by search engines without me putting it on my website?

  • dmichaels
    Asked on March 1, 2015 at 5:03 PM

    So, if I understand this correctly, the search engines won't find the jotform pages unless there is a link on one of my own webpages.

    And if I use robots.txt to exclude those pages that contain links to jotform pages my forms will NOT be crawled and indexed by the various search engines?

    That would be great - please confirm.

    Also, please advise on how the "submissions" are or are not indexed.

    Thanks,

    David

  • Sean
    Replied on March 1, 2015 at 6:45 PM

    Like my superior suggested in the original post, once you have your form linked to a public domain or site bots from search engines can easily locate your form and list for public access.

    If you embed your form on your website using the source code, robots.txt can be used to bar/protect these sensitive pages from the search engine bots so that they are not shared/listed publicly.

    You can get your form source code by following this guide:
    http://www.jotform.com/help/104-How-to-get-the-Full-Source-Code-of-your-Form 

    And, you can get additional information about Robot.txt on these guides:
    http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-txt.html
    http://searchengineland.com/a-deeper-look-at-robotstxt-17573

    I hope this clears things up for you. Please contact us if further clarification is needed.

    Regards

  • dmichaels
    Replied on March 2, 2015 at 4:30 PM

    You said "once you have your form linked". If the link to the form is on a page protected by robots.txt, will that accomplish what we want, namely keeping that form, hosted by jotform.com, from being indexed?

    That would make things (like maintaining the form) so much easier than moving the code to my site.

    Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.

    David

  • Mike
    Replied on March 2, 2015 at 5:35 PM

    I think that you are right in your conclusion about the robots.txt protected web page.

    Additionally, you might add noindex and nofollow robots meta tag to the web pages with listed forms.

    <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

    And also, it is possible to add rel="nofollow" parameter to the form links.

    <a href="http://form.jotformpro.com/form/11111111111111" rel="nofollow">Form Link</a>

    Thank you.