Microsoft: Silverlight content is searchable, too

When Adobe, Google and Yahoo announced earlier this week that content stored in its Flash file format would be more easily indexable by Google's and Yahoo's search engines, Microsoft was nowhere to be found.

I seemed to recall that the Redmondians and their backers, when comparing Silverlight to Flash, had touted before that Silverlight content was easily discoverable by search engines (and not just Live Search's). Was I dreaming?

I asked Microsoft for verification and received the following statement from a company spokeswoman on July 2:

"Microsoft designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines.  Because it is simply a ZIP archive, a Silverlight application packaged in a XAP (the Silverlight application-package file extension) file is easily accessible to search engines without a special software development kit (SDK). And because XAML is W3C-compliant XML, any static textual XAML content can be easily parsed by search engines.  Furthermore, any metadata embedded in the ZIP file is easily indexed by search engines as well.  Silverlight applications also support "deep linking" as they easily consume the URL they were loaded from, and use information on the URL query string to rapidly load and display appropriate data.  Finally, the Silverlight DOM itself can be easily inspected to detect all text, links and images that are being visualized by the control.

"So does this mean that Silverlight offers customers superior search engine optimization (SEO)? Yes.  Not only was Silverlight architected to offer superior searchability, but Silverlight excels at enabling dynamic content published from content management systems to be easily indexed by search engines.  By publishing dynamic content to Silverlight via XAML and XHTML mirroring, users are able to dramatically reduce the time it takes to optimize content for search engines."

Another question for which I don't (yet) have an answer: Can Live Search index Flash content today and how well? (Stay tuned. Let's see what Microsoft has to say about that one.)

Update: Ina Fried at News.com says Microsoft is not commenting on this question... at least for now.

Update 2: I received this statement via a Microsoft Live Search spokesperson late on July 3:

"We do not currently index Flash content. However, we will continue to optimize for the best experience for consumers, webmasters and advertisers. We have nothing additional to announce at this time."

Any SEO experts or content developers/publishers done any comparative analysis on how Flash content and Silverlight content stack up on the findability front? Do you think the new agreements forged with Google and Yahoo (but not Microsoft for Live Search) are going to give Adobe a leg up over Microsoft on this front? If so, why?

Meanwhile, on a related note, Microsoft has launched its Silverlight streaming ads pilot for which it began signing up testers earlier this spring. "This pilot program allows you to upload video content  to Silverlight Streaming and play it back with contextual ads  relevant to the playback experience, based on keywords you provide at video upload time, or configure later on in the video properties," according to a July 2 posting on the Windows Live Dev blog. (Silverlight Streaming is Microsoft's cloud storage service for Silverlight rich media content.)