Any suggestions for making Silverlight content available to search engines?

Question

Assuming the following:

• You have some content currently being displayed in an ASP.NET HTML table.
• You want to use Silverlight for a better user experience.
• It is important that the information be indexed in Google, et al.

What do you do? I know that XAP (Silverlight executables) contain XAML which could theoretically be indexed. But will Google do this? And if so, when? And what if the data being served up is not in the XAML (perhaps it is stored as a resource)?

My first thought is to try to detect search engines and serve up the HTML table. But my limited understanding of SEO makes me wonder whether Google would frown on this practice and possibly black-list the site. And I am not sure how reliable it is to try to detect the search engines anyway.

Is there a definitive correct way to do this which won't get you in trouble with Google?

Answer 1

Search engine optmization is possible in silver light go thru the following link SEO

Answer 2

This is an excellent article with a slide-show on 'Search Engine Friendly Silverlight Applications' from a Software Architect at Microsoft :

http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=200

This MSDN blog post on 'Simple Silverlight SEO with ASP.Net and XSLT' will also be of interest :

http://blogs.msdn.com/synergist/archive/2007/10/03/simple-silverlight-seo-with-asp-net-and-xslt.aspx

Answer 3

Progressive Enhancement. Use the basic HTML table. Use JavaScript to replace the table with the richer interface.

Answer 4

Since Silverlight is still verey limited in browser/OS support, I'd advise to steer clear of it for public webpages, or at least provider traditional alternatives as well, which will then be indexable by search engines.