Google Inside

Here is the thread that I created in the Google Group of Crawling and Indexing.

I’m hoping Matt Cutts or Adam Lasnik will be able to touch on the subject a bit.

We have a few sites that rely heavily upon SEO. We also have a lot of sites on our server, so we want to minimize load time and maximize efficiency.

With those key components in mind, here are some thoughts.

I’ve been contacting a well known search expert back and forth.

The question of: does using XML and XSLT together make for a well search engine optimized site?

The XSLT would be processed all on the client-side so the XML would be output plainly to Google.

The latest response on the topic which is most relevant is this:

“Googlebot will index XML as XML. Google does rank XML pages in the main index but they prefer to rank a normal HTML page. So, yes they understand it but we still should provide an HTML version”

So my question here is this: what would be the best way to tackle this and accomplish a lite-weight website while still achieving a well optimized site for the search engines?

I will be posting any and all updates that are relevant to the answer of this question.