Does Google follow Buttons/Inputs

Question

Does google follow buttons and form inputs when crawling websites? I'm adding rel="nofollow" tags to links I don't want google to follow but I'm not sure if I need to add them to buttons.

For example an 'add to cart' button.

Thanks

Answer 1

Generally, no. Especially not POST-based forms; POST may have side-effects per the RFC, while GET is defined as a "safe" method. Google is experimenting with some "deep web" spidering, however, so it's possible that they may request GET-based forms -- but this isn't yet commonplace, as far as I know.

But according to the standards, spiders should not POST.

In fact, the original announcement from google states that they only follow GET-based forms.

Answer 2

Your "add to cart" button should either POST a form, or execute JavaScript. Google won't do either of those two things.