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SEO 101 | The Beginning SEO Podcast » Blog Archive » Myth Busting
Myth Busting - SEO 101 Style
Content, Meta Tags, Cloaking July 23rd, 2007
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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.
5 Responses to “Myth Busting - SEO 101 Style”
July 23rd, 2007 at 12:17 pm
[…] pages, keyword stuffing meta tags, and submitting to search engines. … article continues at Brian Mark brought to you by FASHION and […]
July 25th, 2007 at 11:52 am
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!
July 25th, 2007 at 11:58 am
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.
July 25th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
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.
July 27th, 2007 at 8:25 am
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.
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