Myth Busting - SEO 101 Style
Cloaking, Content, Meta Tags July 23rd, 2007
Today, we discuss another podcast that I’ve been entertained by lately. He’s been dishing out some “interesting” advice, such as creating doorway pages, keyword stuffing meta tags, and submitting to search engines. We’ll give our take on all of it, pointing you towards the best practices approach.
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Awesome podcasts. Looks like I have some changes I need to make to a site I’m currently building.
Brian, you mentioned a long character string inserted into the HTML of .NET pages. I’m an ASP.NET programmer and it sounds like you are talking about the hidden input .NET generates called the ViewState. The ViewState is an accumulation of the pages controls property values. In some cases (such as forms) this .NET generated hidden input is pretty much necessary so that the users form data is posted to the server. It’s not something you should really be putting into a cookie, although you can. On pages or controls where you don’t want or need information stored in the ViewState, you can use EnableViewState=”false”. You can use that for individual controls on the page, or set it for the entire page.
Is that what you are talking about? If so, my next question is, do bots really look at the contents of hidden inputs?
Thanks for the great info!
Yes, that’d be it. ViewState. I’m not a windows developer.
EnableViewState=”false” should be used on most pages in my mind. Sure, bots don’t read it. But they value content found earlier in the code more than later in the code, so why would you want to push your content lower by having that huge string of characters on pages that don’t need it? Not every link is a form submit, so why would every page need that hidden field? I don’t think they do.
I agree with the turning off of the ViewState (unless it’s necessary) for both SEO and also to cut down on the size of the HTTP response causing the page to load a bit faster. I always make sure I turn it off wherever possible.
There are ways to cause the ViewState to show at the bottom of the HTML as well. A quick search for “move viewstate to the bottom of the HTML” will yield some good code samples. It’s probably a good idea for all sites. I noticed that even when you set it to false for the page, there is still a small hidden ViewState that gets generated for some reason.
In all honesty, at least with GoogleBot, I’ve never really had a problem with the viewstate. I’ve left it in there, and I still have first page serps in a very competitive market.
Removing the viewstate (where possible) is a good idea, moving it to the bottom of the pageon a global level using a base classs is the best way to implement this.
Brent: You’re viewstate is probably still visible even if set to false because you still have the automatically generated form tags in your .aspx page. Take them out and the viewstate should go if it’s set to false.