Monday, April 13, 2009

Indexablity for Search Engines in Silverlight

I saw a question as of late around the indexability of Silverlight for search engines much like an html based web site or web application. I know from my work with Microsoft and the Silverlight team that this has been taken into account and goes well with the toolablity story of microsoft. Compiled Silverlight is in a 'xap' file which is really a zip which is easily opened and any text based files, xml or xaml can be indexed and this was done with intent for this purpose. That being said that doesn't mean that all the of this is working up front as to my knowledge none of the spiders actually search zips yet but we expect that to happen at some point. Assumping that this happens then we want to make sure that our Xaml has logical names related to the content for all our x:name elements and that they are not only included in the application dll but as loose xaml in the xap.

Another thing to consider though is that as mentioned zips(xaps) are not indexed yet so it is a good idea to do the same kinds of things to our host files (actually is a good idea even if the zips are indexed) that you would do to optimized the page for search indexing. ie, meta tags, install experience code etc.

Happy Search indexing optimizationizing...