SEO, Nothing changed.

Gilbert (one of the original guys behind prooving Silverlight + SEO) of  had a great write-up outlining some depth thought around this whole SEO buzz that Adobe unleashed early this week.

https://bits.samiq.net/2008/07/seo-for-ria-status-few-days-later.html

I like this quote:

Microsoft has .XAML and the .XAP extensions, the second been just a zip file renamed; which pretty much are open for anyone to consume, crawl and index; all this available to the world from day 1. XAML at its end is XML and it remains XML once deployed (different to MXML that gets pre-compiled to AS3 and later to binary format for it to be published); which could allow savvy developers to XLST the markup to XHTML, provide a site map as per normal practices and best part, one the content owner, will have the chance to decide what the bot gets to see and what remains invisible.

The discussion put forward is at the end of the day, nothing has changed, the problems of yesterday still exist today and the part hat hits home for me, is the fact you don't need to hire a team of engineers to help you understand our formats - .xap and .xaml.

As for deep linking, same principals apply here for both Adobe and Microsoft; you still need to figure out how your end users move in and out of the solution you’ve built. This still requires a RIA Architect to decide how this composition comes together. Google is unlikely to automate this for us, as in the end this is what the sales pitch during this week has been.

Correct. Google isn't the magic bullet here, you still need to the same amount of work you did prior to Adobe's announcement(s). You still need to figure out how the various views/screens come together, how folks can bookmark (albeit Deep Link) to that point in time. Otherwise you will have as Gilbert outlines in this diagram:

SEO Flash

In some cases this may work, in most RIA it's pretty much a case of "guess where I live" game.

I think this last quote summarises the state of play perfectly

The problem at hand still remains unsolved (so don't think on throwing that SWFObject nor the SWFAddress code away, just yet), all that happened really is Adobe took out some insurance to keep the .SWF extension relevant through the welcoming arms of Google and Yahoo!

Read more here:

https://bits.samiq.net/2008/07/seo-for-ria-status-few-days-later.html