Hi, If I use XML based content, formatted with XSL for a new website, will it trawled effectively by the search engines? Or should I just stick to plain HTML? Thanks, fcmisc.
I'd think the SE's would love it, since XML is designed to be analyzed by computers. I'm not really familiar with doing this, though. What actually gets fed to the end-user? Does the XSL translate everything into XHTML, which is what the browser (and thus the spider) actually see? If so, you haven't really gained much (except flexibility...display these parts of the page to IE, another optimized for text-only to lynx, another for people using Palm Pilots, etc) by not just displaying XHTML in the first place. (i.e. You wouldn't gain much SEO benefit, I wouldn't think). Or do you provide both XML and XSL to the user, and the browser's responsible for translating? I remember reading something that suggests that, a while back. Seems as though IE doesn't support it at all, and probably won't anytime soon. Or maybe it was something totally unrelated.
Dear Jimrthy, Thank you for taking an interest in my query. I'm very new to this technology and have been following the tutorial here: http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/xsl_transformation.asp From what I gather (and I could be wrong on this)... - I'll be provinding the user with an XML document. - The XML document will contain a reference to an XSL file is a template for how the XML should be displayed. People have described this as being CSS for layouts. The benefits of this are fairly obvious if you plan on serving a lot of content that uses the same layout. But I'm concerned that search engines might not trawl it effectively. I haven't really had any definitive answers for my query from the other places that I've posted, but I have a feeling that if I use properly formed XML then search spiders should treat it in a similar way to standard HTML docs. Anyone can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong as I'm just making a blind guess! fcmisc.