Aug
This is the first in a series of articles where I address some of the myths that have become part of the smoke and mirrors that is the area of search engine optimisation (SEO). Some of these are outright falsehoods, others are misunderstandings and some were true but aren’t any more. See I am capable of writing articles that are more than mindless rants and I do have a day job. 
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?
