Can you prevent bot form fills with No Index

[dseckler]

I have a series of landing pages that we use for user registration on our website.  My developers want a captcha on the landing pages to prevent bots from filling out the form and flooding the database with garbage.

I am doing individual landing pages for every promotion I do, so I'm not looking for people to find the landing pages through search.  I want them to only find the landing pages via my promotions.  The site itself has a registration page with captcha. So people who find the site via search will be able to register.

Will No Indexing these pages prevent bot form fills by hiding the landing pages?

[kchandler]

Don, there is a very safe bet that the bots that are spamming forms across the web do not adhere to the "nofollow" or "noindex" meta tags that search engines use. Recently there was a post on MOZ that covered some great alternatives to CAPTCHAs though:

http://moz.com/blog/having-a-captcha-is-killing-your-conversion-rate

Good luck!

• Kyle

[john4math]

One thing you can try is put a few empty fields on the form that are hidden by CSS, and have names that are irresistible to bots (i.e. "name", "email", "comment").  If the form is submitted and any of these field values are not null, don't commit the submission to the database.  The bots will see the hidden fields because they aren't rendering the page.  It'll only take a little work from your devs.

The above solution should catch most (if not all) bots, and won't have any impact on real users or your conversion rate (the post Kyle references isn't kidding around, captchas are hard for users).

[dseckler]

Yes.  I understand that Captchas are hard for users and I'm doing my best to not use them on my forms.

Your suggestion with the hidden fields is genius!  Thanks for the idea.  Simple and effective.  I love that combo.

My thoughts on No Index were to keep the pages from getting crawled by Google.  I was assuming that bots would find the pages if they were indexed.

[john4math]

No problem!  We had the same spam problem on a form many years ago, and this reduced the spam submissions to zero.  Hopefully it'll work for you too!