- Posted by Kevin DeRudder on April 17, 2009
Very often people ask if search engines crawl silverlight sites. The answer is yes and no :-). Yes, they crawl the webpage where the silverlight control is hosted, no they do not enter the silverlight control.
The problem is that Silverlight and other Rich Internet Application technologies load data dynamically, which is off course great for the visitor but a problem for search robots who only know how to read static data (like HTML).
So here are some options:
1. Add static information to the webpage where the silverlight control is hosted:
TIP: place just under the body tag
Now, when we write it like this are users will off course see the text, so we have to throw a little JavaScript to it and css to it.
or write it shorter with:
Imaging that the data is coming from a database off course :-). You could off course use AJAX to load the data in the hidden tags.
2. It is maybe a thought ( so never tried it ), but maybe you could place the content under the silverlight control by using z-index in css.
3. Use the browser integration to get Silverlight content from the control and show it in the page.
4. Because Silverlight is an XML language you can also use XSLT to get the xaml you want and show it your page as static text
Basically, it all comes back to the same thing, change the dynamic data in static data and your Silverlight application will end up higher in the search results.
K.