URL contains a form with a GET method
This means that the URL in question contains a form which uses the GET method.
Why is this important?
When forms are submitted with the GET method, the input data will be appended to the requested URL, e.g. example.com/page1/form.php?name1=value1&name2=value2
This can be bad from an SEO perspective for two reasons:
- These URLs can be cached, and accessed directly by anyone that knows the URL (including search engine crawlers).
- If there are no restrictions on the input fields, this can allow the generation of infinite unique URLs.
If either of the above situations gets out of hand (or are directly manipulated by a third party) this could cause issues with crawl efficiency or index bloat.
What does the Hint check?
This Hint will trigger for any internal HTTP URL which contains a <form> which uses GET.
Examples that trigger this Hint:
The Hint would trigger for any internal URL if it contained the following in the HTML:
Why is this Hint marked 'Potential Issue'?
This Hint is a 'Potential Issue', which means that it is unlikely to be affecting the site at the moment, but should be investigated as it could cause issues in the future.
There might be a situation where you deliberately want or need to use the GET method, for example, to generate URLs that can be accessed outside of the context of the form submission. In this instance, you could consider blocking search crawlers from crawling the form action URL via robots.txt.
However, if this is not the case, consider switching the form method to POST.
