Silverlight content can be easily indexed because it is searchable by design

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Silverlight content can be easily indexed because it is searchable by design

by Avatar	Stumble this!	July 02nd 2008

While Adobe cheers itself to sleep because they have made flash now more search engine friendly. the solution they proposed is not integral or far reaching as what Microsoft did with Silverlight from the start.

Silverlight is searchable by design and it offers a fully integral solution Adobe cannot match. i knew this but until now there was not a Official Announcement from Microsoft on this. Mary Jo Foley got a official response of Microsoft on this:

“Microsoft designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines. Because it is simply a ZIP archive, a Silverlight application packaged in a XAP (the Silverlight application-package file extension) file is easily accessible to search engines without a special software development kit (SDK). And because XAML is W3C-compliant XML, any static textual XAML content can be easily parsed by search engines. Furthermore, any metadata embedded in the ZIP file is easily indexed by search engines as well. Silverlight applications also support “deep linking” as they easily consume the URL they were loaded from, and use information on the URL query string to rapidly load and display appropriate data. Finally, the Silverlight DOM itself can be easily inspected to detect all text, links and images that are being visualized by the control.

“So does this mean that Silverlight offers customers superior search engine optimization (SEO)? Yes. Not only was Silverlight architected to offer superior searchability, but Silverlight excels at enabling dynamic content published from content management systems to be easily indexed by search engines. By publishing dynamic content to Silverlight via XAML and XHTML mirroring, users are able to dramatically reduce the time it takes to optimize content for search engines.”

So why Microsoft has not made a big fuzz about it yet?. if Silverlight was already superior to flash (and flex for that matter) also in that area. Simple. because they don`t need too right now. it is logical that Microsoft will wait on making any kind of announcement like that until they have fully deployed their Silverlight strategy. that will happen at the end of the Summer (or sooner) when they release Silverlight 2.0 Final and Silverlight Mobile 1.0. i still think that this could be happening before the Olympics because the advanced coverage is powered by Silverlight 2.0 .

The other question is why Live Search was not included by Adobe and that may be because they are competitors to the death and by excluding them, they can also force them to comply without Adobe having to ask them to.

The bottom line is that with Silverlight will also allow to get your widgets indexed and help you to easily find Silverlight Widgets (Gadgets).