SEO/Viewstate

jimibt · August 27th, 2007, 09:52 AM

Been reading up on the various pro's and con's of asp.net and SEO (a whole other subject, so won't go into too much here) and came across a few suggestions of moving the viewstate to the bottom of the page (which i've implemented in the basepage.sc class in the protected override void Render() method, the rationalle being that only the 1st 100k of the page is actually read in by the spiders and if a big part of that page is viewstate, then the page isn't going to be very welll rnaked or indexed. So far, so good. But it strikes me that the viewstate is a hidden field and therefore may be ignored by the search engine spiders anyway.

anyone got any REAL evidence to support or refute any of these claims?? Basically, i've got no issue in moving the viewstate in code as it's a miniscule amount of processing but obviously, if it doesn't need to be done, then i'd prefer not to do it at all.

thoughts please...!! :D

jimi

http://www.jamestollan.com

dparsons · August 27th, 2007, 10:46 AM

While the viewstate control is a hidden field it is still optimal to move it to the bottom of the page or to disable it all together. Personally, if your viewstate isn't more then 5K, you should be ok from needing to move it to the bottom of the page.

Be warned though, google places a bit of emphasis on where X keyword appears in your copy so, if you have 100K of viewstate (hell even 5K), X keyword is going to appear much farther down the page than if you move your viewstate.

The "best practice", of course, would be to move the viewstate to the bottom of the page and have your content be the first chunk of data directly after your <body> tag, followed by your menu, and then your viewstate.

hth.

(BTW, you might want to check out Christian and Jamie's book: Professional SEO with ASP.NET, follow the link in my profile if you are interested.)

================================================== =========
Read this if you want to know how to get a correct reply for your question:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
================================================== =========
Technical Editor for:
Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET

Professional IIS 7 and ASP.NET Integrated Programming

================================================== =========

jimibt · August 27th, 2007, 11:03 AM

dave,

good points. looks like i'll keep the viewstate at the bottom then.

cheers for 'confirming' my thoughts

jimi

http://www.jamestollan.com

dparsons · August 27th, 2007, 11:43 AM

No problem jimi have a good day.

-Doug

================================================== =========
Read this if you want to know how to get a correct reply for your question:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
================================================== =========
Technical Editor for:
Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET

Professional IIS 7 and ASP.NET Integrated Programming

================================================== =========