Viewstate & SEO

Anyone have examples of using viewstate successfully...

[ChadSEO]

I wondering if anyone has any examples, anecdotal or specific, of sites that use .NET, has the viewstate at the top of the page, and has good rankings. I'm currently working on a site redesign, and need to find a compromise between the developers needing the viewstate at the top, and pressure from above to remove everything possible from the top of the page. I haven't even been able to find a site running .NET so far, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you do have examples of specific sites, you can send me a sticky with them.

Thanks,
Chad

[mrMister]

It's not viewstate itself that causes the problems with search engines, it's how it's used.

However, there's absolutely no need to use it. In most uses, It will significatly increase your site's average page size and that's bad for visitors as well as search engines.

[tomasz]

You can move it to the buttom of the page.
[webmasterworld.com...]

[ChadSEO]

Viewstate is over-used and larger than it has to be when you don't know what you're doing. However, there are times when it is useful. We've managed to reduce it down to about 100-bytes. And for some strange reason, we encountered some very bizarre performance issues when the viewstate was at the bottom, which were resolved when we moved it back to the top.

Chad

[Susan]

I too have noticed some performance issues when it's moved to the bottom. I didnt look into it much to see what the problem was, i just focused on getting the ViewState size down, which was a much better approach. I agree that when used properly, it can be reduced quite significantly than if you just let it go..

[helloponty]

I belive that its quite useful since it has given state to a stateless html page. ;-)