Forms and link juice

[lucek]

On product listing page on e-commerce site We use POST forms as 'Add To Cart' buttons. Because of that We have dozens (~40-80) forms on any product listing page, and two questions regarding them:

• Does these forms affect link juice of other links on the page?
• Are there cases when forms are somehow counted by Google as links?

Regards,

Lucek

[MagicDude4Eva]

I personally would change the form into a HREF - this would reduce page-size on the form-elements by 50% (i.e. 40 x 195 bytes).

i.e. 

I have not found that the amount of links on a page drastically affects link authority of other links (typically your important links would be structured above the product listing anyway)

[ProsperoDigital]

You shouldn't have a problem with this passing through link juice. I would suggest that you block your checkout pages with either the robots.txt or using a robots meta tag, just to be sure. You could also use webmaster tools to exclude parameters such as ?, this will make sure they never attribute any importance to these pages.

[lucek]

Sure:

[ProsperoDigital]

Could you send a snipppet of the HTML for the add to cart buttons?

[matbennett]

wow - 40-80 forms. My concerns would be usability and performance.  Can't imagine how they are used: I'd love to see the page.

However I've never seen evidence that forms pass link authority, or at least not in large enough amounts to cause a noticeable effect.  If they did then peoples cart pages would be much more authoritative than they generally are.

I've never specifically tested that though.