There was a reason it was removed, and I don't recall why that was or which update, but it is no longer an option.

Many thanks for the responses. An SEO guy wanted us to move it and I was surprised to find the checkbox was not there on the new site.


Jenny

Thanks for this Andy. I did not think of that. I don't think this customer would want to pay for custom programming but I will bear it in mind for future reference.


Jenny

A few people have raised that concern over the years (would hiding viewstate from Google be considered black hat or white hat?).

I can't find a definitive answer. Matt Cutts has shown many examples of black hat cloaking, but they all involve searchable text. Viewstate is a hidden form field that--hopefully--is ignored by the crawlers. My guess is that Google et al would give you bonus points for removing it when they come calling.

And you don't have to identify every crawler...just the ones you care about such as Google, Bing, etc.

An even better solution is to reduce the use of viewstate as much as possible which is what we're doing in BV6.

Yes, we removed the option in 5.6 because of complaints that if a shopper clicks a button before the page is fully loaded with viewstate at the bottom it can throw a nasty error.

We're moving to phase out viewstate as much as possible and where appropriate in BV 6. Especially on the store facing pages.

And how exactly would you propose blocking hyperlinks on a loading page since Javascript doesn't kick in until the page load in complete?

I have fantastic engine performance on my client's sites. Even with the viewstate at it's current size & placement. I am a stickler for reducing code and have always felt that the viewstate gets in the way, but my own work check mates my feelings.

A part of the viewstate discussion I think matters most is the pure size of it and it's possible affect on page load times through cell phone browsers.