Adobe made a deal with Google to improve SEO on flash. Anything about Silverlight?

Question

Adobe made a deal with Google so that google engine reads SWF contents for SEO. The whole thing has to do with indexing some static swf content and not crawling it any further, but that's at least something. Example Does anybody know if similar efforts were/will be made for Silverlight? At least will Bing support reading Silverlight content? Have you heard anything about it?

Answer 1

As Microsoft has a search engine itself you can expect Silverlight to be searchable because it's in their own best interest to do so.

From Wikipedia:

Textual content created with Silverlight is searchable and indexable by search engines as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML).

A quick search reveals a few articles detailing how you can make Silverlight content easily searchable:

• Silverlight SEO
• Search Engine Optimizations for Silverlight Applications

Answer 2

SEO in Silverlight: http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Silverlight-SEO.aspx

At the moment there isn't any easy solution to SEO in Silverlight. I think that SEO have high priority in the next release of Silverlight.

Answer 3

Silverlight content can be read by search engines. When it comes to SEO though, you have two choices:

• Stick to good old XAML: robots do read it and it is indeed better than nothing.
• The more SEO friendly approach is adding HTML content to the Silverlight object either by hand or by implementing a control that generates this content. This approach implies extra development but delivers better results, see the article on SEO for Silverlight Applications and SEO for Silverlight Applications Part 2: a Real-World Example

So crawling of Silverlight content is to be supported, however if you want to make sure you get crawled and added to indexes, be sure to use some HTML as described in the articles linked.