Here is a shout out to Mr Anthony McLaughlin for the help and advice with the design. Especially for the advice on the use of colour and leading me to that very funky font. Us programmers need all the help we can get with design.

Let me know your thoughts and comments below. Also if you spot any bugs or where I have overlooked some styles please let me know.

ASP.NET websites use a hidden form field to store what is called the Viewstate. This is simply encoded information detailing what has occurred on the page since it is loaded. It is an attempt to add state to the stateless. How successful it is at doing so depends on your point of few but that is not the subject of this article. There has been some contention on whether this view state negatively effects the search engine friendliness of a web site. To the point the Internet is awash with howtos detailing the steps need to move or remove it. The notion is that because the Viewstate is at the top of the body and because search engines only read a certain amount of the HTML body that Viewstates encoded gibberish pushes out search engine optimised content. This your SEO consultant will, for a small fee, tell you is bad. But is it?

The short answer is no. Basically search engines used to read only 100KB of the page content but this is information circa 2006 and things have changed since then. Google for example now indexes 500KB of the content on a page. Normally the Viewstate is 5-10KB but it has been show to increase to 100KB upwards. Obviously you can see why people where concerned about it. Unfortunately nobody was ever able to show that the Viewstate ever adversely affected search engine indexing and ranking. However as is the way with black art of SEO people did it anyway, just in case. Frankly if your Viewstate is hitting 100k you have bigger issues than SEO, namely an unresponsive web site. With its 500KB indexing you might find Google has a better time with your site than your actual users.

The other problem with idea that Viewstate is a SEO issue, is that it is stored in a hidden form input field. The closer to the top you keywords and SEO content is to the top of your page the better right? Putting junk in before it surely going to make your lovingly crafted SEO content less effective. Now putting useful and often irrelevant text into a hidden form field is something search engine spammers caught on to a long time ago. Google has almost certainly been ignoring hidden input fields for quite sometime, if not always. In addition the world class developers at Google should be more than up to speed on Microsoft technologies and they will be taking Viewstate into account. The developers who manage other search engines too. Unless you think they would be stupid enough to cut off their nose to spite their face by penalising all ASP.NET sites.

So there has never been any real proof it did have negative SEO implications and it almost certainly doesn’t  now. There, I just saved you a consultancy fee and stopped you annoying your developer by giving him unnecessary work.