Search Engine Optimization in XML+XSLT designs

It's amazing that the question “how do I perform SEO for a web site that does XSLT transformation on the browser” still pops up, as the short answer is very obviously “You can't.”The long answer is, as always, a bit more complex:

• Google can process XML data, but only stores it into supplementary index (lower rankings)
• If the server's XML output does not contain enough context (for example, product description in HTML-ish format), the search engines cannot make any sense out of it, so it would not be indexed appropriately.
• Search engines will not follow explicit (let alone implicit) links in XML documents, so you need a sitemap (classic HTML page, Atom/RSS feed or Google sitemap) to help search engines find the content pages

Until Google (and other search engines) implement XSLT transformations, the only sensible approach is to detect the client capabilities on the server and perform the XSLT transformation on the server if the client cannot do it (the whole architecture is described in my InformIT article Optimized Presentation of XML Content that was published almost exactly a year ago).