[recoiledsnake]

>Most .Net people I've interviewed think page load speed doesn't matter.

Have you informed them that you work with a high traffic site? Most intranet sites are not high traffic, so if they're spending time pre-optimizing for speed instead of features/development time, they're actually wasting the company's money.

And what has viewstate got to do with SEO? You lost me.

For SEO friendly URLs, all you need a is URL Rewriter. http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=a...

>only the people who knew internals of platform well could fix it

That's true of any platform out there.

[sajidnizami]

Something like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1185984/is-viewstate-bad-...

Yes I talk to them that we have a high traffic site and we lose them because they don't know about building them. Besides you won't find many Microsoft stack sites dealing with scaling issues. I personally looked up Stackoverflow scaling case studies to design my solutions later.

Back in 2005/6 URL rewriting was still pretty difficult. I started out back then. I converted to MVC completely when 1.0 version came out specifically to address the SEO concerns.

But I guess our discussion is swinging to technical side :)

[PonyGumbo]

In ASP.NET 4.0 and MVC, URL routing is built-in, and it's easy as pie.

[pixelbath]

SEOs prefer to have the "relevant content" as high on the page as possible. Since viewstate is just a large blob, many SEOs assume it decreases relevancy. I've never seen results that confirm this assumption.

Edit: See sajidnizami's post for the relevant StackOverflow question. Though, this still doesn't make sense to me logically. Why would a search engine disregard a (reasonably) longer page?

[sajidnizami]

Longer page would increase page load time. A longer page with viewstate at the beginning would delay loading of content. Google penalizes pages that load slower.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-sit...