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Will big .NET session gunk affect my SEO?

my page source if full of grawlix

         

httpwebwitch

8:27 pm on Jan 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I have some pages that return search results from a private database; these are paginated into a datagrid. It's all done in C#.

I really want these pages to be as indexable as possible. I'm even going as far as an ISAPI rewrite strategy to make the URLs look nice.

What concerns me is that when I look at the page source, I see:

<input type="hidden" name="__EVENTTARGET" value="" />
<input type="hidden" name="__EVENTARGUMENT" value="" />
<input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" value="dDwtNzQ3MzU5N [... about 30 lines of garbage ...] bR0NUc=" />

it's that _VIEWSTATE variable that I'm concerned about. It's huge. Will it affect my SEO?

And because those variables are visible in the source, any bot worth its salt will know it's a dynamic ASP.NET page. Will my pages be ignored?

macrost

9:13 pm on Jan 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



httpwebwitch,
Personally, I don't think a bot will care about the viewstate. All that does is persist the data that might filled in a form on a postback. If you are concerned, you can disable the view state in the page directive in the aspx page. <%@ Page EnableViewState="false" %>

Just make sure your URL's are cleaned up and have no querystrings, and you will be fine!

bcolflesh

9:21 pm on Jan 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

HitsAndClicks

9:33 pm on Jan 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I don't see any potential problems with it personally.

raywood

5:43 pm on Jan 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think it might depend on the size of the grid. I've built pages that had viewstate data twice as big as the page content. Simply turning off viewstate can cause trouble with paging the datagrid, if you're using paging. Search for "datagrid on a diet". I found an article by Jim Ross that was extremely helpful to me.

bakedjake

8:25 pm on Jan 31, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Uh yeah.... Viewstate will all but murder your pages in the search engines.

I recommend highly that you turn it off.