RIA and Search Engine Optimisation......Adobe leading the charge

I've often commented on my wish for the Silverlight team to focus a little more on Search Engine Optimisation (and printing support....but that's a topic for another day) as I feel that this is one area that could put off a lot of business users (yes you can argue that it is an application and if your application is content rich then possibly your application should be built in asp.net with occassional use of Silverlight to add "islands of richness").

There are ways of having a search engine friendly Silverlight application (my plan was to have something more solid by now but life has been busy...it is however still on my todo list :D) but I was/am hoping that it does get some attention either now or in the near future.

Looks like Adobe are aiming to do this:

 http://finance.paidcontent.org/paidcontent?GUID=5882489&Page=MediaViewer&Ticker=ADBE

"Adobe Flash Technology Enhances Search Results for Dynamic Content and Rich Internet Applications

Adobe Systems Incorporated (ADBE) today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. "
 
I know the team are busy and they only have so much time/resource etc and I really do think they are doing a great job I just wish this and printing support (sorry couldn't resist) got some attention instead of focusing on X number of controls (Third Party Vendors will fill any gap soon enough).

Update: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html more information about this for those of you who are interested.

John

1 Comment

  • Actually I think this is very important. In the real business world I was often expressly forbidden to use Flash because it got a bad reputation for SEO. Even today I've seen web sites done entirely in Flash that will be invisible to the search engines. Silverlight will be dead on arrival if it hides your web site content from the search engines.

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