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The Googlebot fills out forms

A post in Google's Webmaster Central Blog proved a rumor to be true which which has been arround for a while now: the Googlebot will, under certain circumstances, automatically fill out HTML-forms and crawl the returned page. Until now forms were insignificant from a SEO point of view; searchengines have always ignored them. Google is taking this step to discover and index part of the “deep-web”, the part of the Internet which is hidden away in databases and forms and has therefore been unaccessible for searchengines.

This is an interesting step, which – if expanded and implemented consequently in the future – will definitely have a large impact on the daily SEO-work. Currently the “visualization” of the content for comprehensive, database-driven sites is one of the main tasks of the searchengine-optimization. This could be reduced and possibly even become obsolete. I am a little critical of this, seeing that Google does not wish to have “SERPs in SERPs” on the one hand but now conducts its own searches and indexing on the other – I am curious how they will handle this matter.