The greatest SilverLight lie
I’ve been to a few SilverLight events and read about it on the web, I’ve even played with it a little, and I think it’s very interesting. But, one thing I’ve learned from all of these experiences, beside the fact that the average dot.net developer feels awed when he sees how to create a rectangle with a gradient fill, is that Microsoft is pumping the fallacious fact that SilverLight is SEO (Search Engine Optimized) because it uses external XAML files, which are basically plain XML files. In the last event I were at, the presenter repeated this "fact" with such determination, which made me jump out of my seat with rage, well not really rage :), I’ve just explained it to him nicely why it’s not true. He was more modest with he’s determinations, afterwards.
Even though it’s a known fact that SilverLight isn’t just SEO out of the box, I still see this being repeated all over the web. You should question authority, and shouldn’t believe everything you’re being told, even if it’s Microsoft.
Currently, search engines don’t even bother looking at XAML files, IMHO they won’t start parsing it any time soon. The same way google don’t parse dynamically loaded XML files, since it can’t do much with it, you can’t get much out of a parsed XAML unless your looking for a Rectangle that is positioned at x=0.1232 and y=33.4355.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
“You should question authority, and shouldn’t believe everything you’re being told.”
Thank you.
Strange beliefs can persist for awhile, but if it’s any consolation, then Galileo had a much tougher time than we do today.
jd/adobe
March 5th, 2008 at 6:47 am
I’d modify one of your sentences:
You should question authority, and shouldn’t believe everything you’re being told, ESPECIALLY if it’s Microsoft.
March 5th, 2008 at 8:42 am
LoL, thanks for your funny comments, guys
I do find comfort in that, although we are ignorants sometimes we do live in a better times then Galileo, I really do.
March 5th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Actually it does, check out this post…
http://weblogs.asp.net/jmandia/archive/2008/01/04/silverlight-seo-search-engine-optimisation-optimization.aspx
March 5th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Jody, thanks for the link,
The fact that he’s website rank high on search engines doesn’t mean that the technology is searchable as it is.
All of the tricks he represented and the article he linked to, are all describing the same old SEO technics that are used to optimize Flash and Ajax content for years.
Actually SL SEO is even worse then Flash since the later is being parse by search engines to some extent.
http://blog.guya.net/2006/03/16/can-you-make-me-first-in-google/
For example, if you’ll search nokia N95 in google, you’ll get this 100% Flash website first out of 4,440,000:
http://www.nseries.com/
It’s a beautiful website, btw.
March 27th, 2008 at 1:10 am
I’ve always thought that the search engines could spider more dynamic content if they wanted to but with dynamic content and text flying in and out of the screen and tweening, there is no guarantee that the text results in question will even be shown to the user. Therefore, why should the search engines give preference to content that is hard to verify over more relevant and verifiable static html content? Embedded xml or external text files will not solve this issue as it will always be harder to verify textual content within rich media. At the end of the day it is just a movie or graphic and should be indexed as such.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:15 am
Exactly, search engine can retrieve and parse the content. Their challenge is to make this info useful for the user.
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