If you use Real Studio Web Edition right now the contents of your app are invisible to Google. I think a lot of people are using WE for internal projects or for apps that need a user to log in before anything useful is available. This isn’t a problem for that kind of project but for some web apps it would be nice to have certain areas show up in Google’s search results.
This isn’t just an issue with WE, other AJAX based web apps have the same type of issue and Google has a document that describes how to make AJAX web apps crawlable:
http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/
The basic idea is that you have special hash tags for the parts of the your app that should be indexed. When Google sees those it asks your app for snapshot of what the app would look like after the JavaScript has been evaluated.
One approach that Google suggests for getting snapshots is to use something like HtmlUnit. HtmlUnit is a program that acts like a web browser but doesn’t have a user interface. It executes JavaScript just like a browser would and then you can extract the contents of the page.
I did a little bit of experimentation and found that this approach works for simple cases. I ran into a some problems with a real application but they probably have solutions. It seems like the best solution, though, is for WE to support Google’s approach itself. I’ve created a feedback report requesting this as a feature.
If there are parts of your app that could serve as entry points and you want to be able to drive search engine traffic to them, please sign to this report:
feedback://showreport?report_id=19412