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People are bringing me .NET websites lately that are not doing well on the SERPs -- and in every case this approach is being used, because it allows ViewState and other information to be passed back to the server on various user actions.
<body>
<form>
The entire page code is inside here.
</form>
</body>
Now there's lots of other things we're working on fixing with these sites, so I can't say I've fully isolated this factor as an issue. But I'm beginning to wonder if the "insides" of a form element aren't notched down a bit in the various Search Engine algorithms. It just seems like internal links, keywords, anchor text etc are all working in a kind of subdued or muffled way on these sites, compared to my expectations from past experience.
The reason this issue is coming up is that in .NET, there is a standard practice that involves wrapping the entire page in a form element.
tedster, I was hoping to see a response to this by now. I think it might pull a little more attention over in the .net forum.
I too am interested to hear from the .NET developers on this issue. You've also got the viewstate issues to deal with which some still haven't figured out.
I personally have not seen any issues but that doesn't mean that they are not present. I've got thousands of pages sitting out there wrapped in <form> tags that perform fairly well. ;)
