Perry:
I saw Nikhil's post just after I sent of the email. I think some of his
ideas are great but I don't think it's a full solution. I.e. no deep
linking.
My comment
>>Then the SL app would use these to set the state ("navigate" to specific
content or set the selected index in a list of content).
may not be clear enough. I'm talking about selecting content within the page
not using multiple xaml pages. I believe this is deep linking.
Michael:
Again this will bring the user to your site but won't bring them to the
specific content their expecting from the search. See bellow for more.
Jose:
When I saw your link to visitmix.com I was blown away!
http://sessions.visitmix.com/?selectedSearch=BT03 is a deep link!
Your link to a video about Silverlight SEO demonstrates Silverlight SEO!
When the link loads it loads a Silverlight Application which then displays a
search result according to the url. In this case it's session BT03.
I'm certain that they are using some thing link initparams to do this.
The site however doesn't go the extra step to serve up content to spiders as
can be seen if you turn off javascript and navigate to the above link.
This is what is the complex part of the problem.
I will watch this video and get back to you.
Thanks all for your input.
Cheers,
Jonathan
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Behalf Of Jose Fajardo
Sent: Thursday, 20 March 2008 7:46 AM
To: [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [OzSilverlight] Silverlight SEO
Hi,
What you highlight is definetely on the radar of Microsft I believe. They
had a great session at Mix08 titled Advanced SEO for web developers
(http://sessions.visitmix.com/?selectedSearch=BT03). But I also watched
another video where the silverlight team talked about the work they were
doing with SEO in particular with 2.0 because now the distribution method is
nolonger xAML but XAP's which as we all know are zip files which can contain
hundreds of files including xAml's and resource fiels (ripe for spidering).
The biggest point I took from the videos was that ultimately it would be up
to the search engine owners (google's, live search, yahoo search) to work
out how to get to the data, and more importantly what constituted important
data. I belive the Live Search team are work hard to ensure our RIA's are
given every advantage of making there way up the search page ranks. It's now
up to the other engines to acknowledge initiatives in this direction.
As for what we designers/developers can do honestly I'll keep filling in the
tag's, layer names as I've always have.As for URL re-writing for internal
navigation within silverlight (where an external unique url adress that is
spider friendly will get you to the correct silverlight instance), I believe
there are things out there that can do this easily I've seen one solutiong
BUT I believe it's too early to commit to anything when the search engines
themselves haven't acknowledged they are spidering them.
It's going to be an interesting couple of years if it plays out in favour of
RIA over traditional sites!
Jose Fajardo
----- Original Message -----
From: Jonathan Parker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 3/20/2008 12:07:15 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [OzSilverlight] Silverlight SEO
Hi All,
I've been looking into SEO for Silverlight a bit and found that it's not all
as easy as it is made out to be.
The issue is that in most apps the content (which is what you want indexed)
is not part of the xaml.
This would be the case if you just had static content inside the xaml but
this is rarely the case with silverilght.
The way that crawlers/spiders crawl content on dynamic sites (e.g. content
from a DB) is by following links.
So although you can have hyperlinks in SL it's not really the natural way to
expose content as it's easier to
download content via the network API vs. loading a whole new dynamically
generated xaml page from the server.
So the question arises how does flash handle SEO.
Well apparantly there is some support. For example
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=filetype%3Aswf> &q=filetype%3Aswf
Now unless these sites are dynamically generating ( or more likely just have
a custom handler for ) swf files then
this means swfs are "parsable" and "indexable" though when it comes to
exposing the state of the swf with deep links I don't think
that works out of the box.
So the question is how to implement SEO in general and deep links in
particular for SL.
My current theory is that you could pass the url/query string to SL by using
the initparams:
function createSilverlight()
{
Silverlight.createObject(
"plugin.xaml", // Source property value.
parentElement, // DOM reference to hosting DIV tag.
"myPlugin", // Unique plug-in ID value.
{ // Plug-in properties.
width:'600', // Width of rectangular region of plug-in in pixels.
height:'200', // Height of rectangular region of plug-in in pixels.
version:'1.0' // Plug-in version to use.
},
{ }, // No events defined -- use empty list.
"param1, param2"); // InitParams property value.
}
Then the SL app would use these to set the state ("navigate" to specific
content or set the selected index in a list of content).
This would handle links from a search engine but you would still have to
generate the urls and content for the spider to crawl.
This I think is done at the moment using the "javascript" test. I.e. spiders
don't execute JS and therefore you can take advantage
of that by displaying xml/html with content and links if JS is "disabled".
The first issue doesn't seem so difficult but the second one I'm finding
hard to get my head around.
Any thoughts?
Jonathan Parker (MCTS - Web Applications)
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Blog: www.jonathanparker.com.au
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