In this TechCrunch article, they report that Adobe has released a stripped down version of the engine that can parse the swf files and give back info that is useful for the indexing engines. Its unknown whether Google or Yahoo (the report doesn't mention Live.com as one of the search engines it gave the technology to) will use it, but I expect they will.
So the question comes up, what about Silverlight apps? Will SEO for Silverlight become a big bargaining chip? I hope Microsoft responds though with the .xap and XAML files, Silverlight is already pretty easy to consume. My one request would be that Silverlight 2 stop embedding the .xaml into the assemblies so that the search engines don't have to double dig to get to the XAML.
When I teach Silverlight 2, I stress an important lesson that I thought that we (as developers) had learned the importance of linkability of the web. Early usage of Flash was the first time I noticed this. A number of those sites would create nested functionality that never changed the URL. If the URL doesn't change, i can't bookmark it. Most Flash guys learned their lessons pretty quick, but now I am inundated with AJAX driven sites that try hard to not to do post-backs. That's cool, but if the URL doesn't change I can't link to it.
I've noticed this happening a lot with support sites. The first time I saw with an AJAX site was using the Intersoft's Developer Portal (http://www.intersoftpt.com). They treat the developer to a desktop-like experience, but if I can't send a link to my other developers for the latest patch, why bother making it on the web?
The latest is the game Spore's forums. Trying to help a friend figure out why its crashing, I found some good posts on workarounds but the site's address is always http://www.spore.com/forum. What's the point?
This post is a request...a pleading...begging even. Think about the usability of your sites. If it lives on the Internet, it should be linkable. Now if your site doesn't have state, this doesn't apply to you, but for the other 99.999% of the sites out there, don't get too caught up in the frenzy of AJAX or RIA to make your sites usable. The reality is that you can do this with Silverlight, Flash, AJAX or any web page. It might be more work, but the level of frustration for users is well worth your time.
(NOTE: Microsoft is working on a new version of their AJAX toolkit to enable URL changes during partial page updates. This will help some of you, but the rest of you will still need to do some of the hard work yourselves.)
Two weeks ago I used IE 6's new "Manage Addins..." to disable the Flash plugin. I was worried about some of the content I'd miss. After two weeks, my experience has been that I have not missed much. Here is a short list of what I've noticed without Flash:
- The Good:
- Stopped getting annoying Flash-based ads that were hijacking my web-browsing experience
- SlashDot is working again. I was getting flash-based ads that were forwarding me to other sites.
- The Bad (sorta):
- Several sites interactive stuff isn't available to me, including:
Overall I am happy. The good certainly outweighs the bad IMHO . What's your experience?
