slimster.net

I feel like I have been baptized in a fiery hell once again as .NET code jibberish and automagic nastiness throw a monkey wrench into blissful SEO simplicity.

If you are converting a site to the Microsoft.NET platform, consider the following:
Hyperlinks are inherently created as postbacks in the .NET world. Why is that important? Search engines don’t perform Javascript functions, JS is a function of the browser. If a search engine can’t perform the Javascript needed to follow a link, then the links leading into deeper content will not be followed. In order to make hyperlinks “static”, one must overwrite the inherent creation of hyperlinks in .NET-land.

“Viewstate” – If you don’t know what viewstate is, here is a sample: “wEPDwUKMTU4MTM5MTg0NGQYAQUeX19Db250cm9sc1JlcXVp…”
Now, multiply the length of that string times 10,000 and you will have an understanding of this encoding that Microsoft conveniently places in it’s web pages (actually pages that contain forms – which is basically how .NET works). Why is this a problem? Google arrives at your site, starts reading content and then encounters thousands of lines of jibberish. What does Google think your site is about? Jibberish, not keywords. Viewstate also helps push page sizes way beyond 100k (where Google likes to ‘draw the line’ in terms of acceptable page size).

Cookieless session: “Cookieless session” is Microsoft’s backup plan that happens under the hood when the Microsoft.NET engine identifies a user agent that does not accept cookies. If cookies are not accepted, Microsoft goes ahead and changes the url so that it now contains session data. The problem is that Googlebot is a user agent that does not accept cookies. Unless cookieless session is turned OFF, .NET will push urls that not contain jibberish like this:
www.mysite.com/(S(bty1rnarmoubdc45b0yp0v42233))/products/
If it is not readily apparent, this will totally muck up urls and will have a detrimental impact with how Google interprets your urls and site content.

Converting your site to .NET? Think long and hard and test, test test! There are ways around all problems, they just take time and effort. Don’t put forms on pages unless they are absolutely needed. On pages with forms, investigate ways to reduce the size of viewstate. Use Isapi rewrite to make urls user friendly. And turn off cookieless session!