Question

Is a full silverlight website content searchable to any browser like google/yahoo just like an HTML website?

thank you

Answer 1

If you have separate Silverlight content on each page then you do SEO in the “normal” way on each page.

If your application is one single Silverlight xap file then it’s not going to indexable by the search engines.

From the Google support page:

Google can crawl and index the text content of Flash files, but we still have problems accessing the content of other rich media formats such as Silverlight. These rich media formats are inherently visual, which can cause some problems for Googlebot. Unlike some Internet spiders, Googlebot can read some rich media files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Also, rich media designers often include content in the form of graphics, and because Google can’t detect words included in graphics, it can miss important keywords. In other words, even if we can crawl your content and it is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links.

I think this says it all really.

The Silverlight show site has some advice:

f your website is one Silverlight application and you need search engines to index it, you definitely need to think of a way how to do SEO. I strongly suggest not to create the whole website using Silverlight. I prefer using it only for animations and displaying data in an unusual way (charts, graphics, etc). If you need a special Silverlight application that performs something, you won’t need to do SEO in most of the cases. Do not forget that Silverlight is running in the browser, so everything is going on locally.