We’ve been wrestling with some SEO questions about web sites created with Microsoft .NET. Specifically, does ASP.NET view state effect Google’s crawling and indexing of a web site?
What’s view state? Web sites created with Microsoft’s ASP.NET which leverage view state (by default all .NET web sites utilize view state) place a hidden field in a form named (you guessed it) viewstate (or more correctly ‘__VIEWSTATE’) which retains values of control elements on a page between reposts.
Depending upon how it view state is used on a .NET page, view state can be a short string, or, it can be a long string. It can also be a VERY long string. So, what’s the concern?
The ‘__VIEWSTATE’ variable is placed high up on the page, inside the BODY tag, and above all text-content. From what is known about Google’s crawling activity, Google only consumes the first 100k of a web page (at least until it has established some level of trust or respect for the page). Therefore, one could argue that viewstate has the ability to truncate the real content on a large page.
It’s also arguable that pushing the content further down the page will be frowned upon (in general) by Google. Here are a few example .NET web pages exhibiting view state of varying lengths (visit a page, view the source, and find ‘VIEWSTATE’):
Terralever - Contact Us Page (and example of a relatively small view state)
Ensynch - Request Info Page (an example of a medium to large view state)
Cambridge Properties - List Page (an example of a fairly large view state)
Can anyone point me to a Google authority with a clear answer?
There’s a few articles that mention (and address) the problem below. What I’m trying to determine if it is in fact a problem.References:
…And the value of this field can continue on for a long time. I’ve seen cases where the viewstate is over 100k or more. The problem this has with search engines is many times a search engine will rank your page based on where a keyword occurs in the document. For example, say you’re searching on ASP.NET and you first have 100k of viewstate and then your keyword appears within the HTML document. This could affect how your page ranks for that keyword since many search algorithms base relavancy on where the keyword appears or how close to the top of the document it appears.
Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen
I was working on some ASP.NET hacks and wanted to move the ViewState to the bottom of the page in order to get Google to pay more attention to my page and less to the wad of Base64′ed ViewState.
UPDATE: 9 September 2007
At the time of placing this post, I had reached out to Avinash Kaushik (Occam’s Razor) who is a Google Evangelist. He did reply, but unfortunately let me know that he did not have an answer. He suggested the Google Webmaster Forums as Google engineers would come across the question. I submitted the viewstate question there but unfortunately haven’t received any feedback from anyone with an authoritative answer.
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