I've read and searched over the last two days probably 25 different articles. I guess the question is; does having the viewstate information higher up in the page negatively effect SERPs? There seems to be much debate one way or the other and I've heard google will only cache the first 100kb of each page, but haven't yet confirmed this. Thanks
Make sure your code is not too heave on the site because if it is google cache will not read all of the site content
There is a hidden text box which carries this information on the page. A page having view state at the top of the page could affect your page rankings,