An Overview to App Linking and Google’s App Indexing

5 min readMar 14, 2017

Many Global companies are moving(expected to be moving) from desktop to mobile platform to reach their business goals. The Forrester carried out a survey back in 2012, which reports that search through App Store was the most popular way for users to find new apps, rather than word-of-mouth.

Only 34% of users are downloading iOS apps. This is because they see the App only in Apple App Store homepage (or) in Top Charts. So, here comes ASO — App Store Optimization. In simple, it’s SEO for Mobile Apps to improve their visibility in App Store and increase downloads.

Analysts says,

New apps are uploaded every day and it’s thought that less than 1% of them are financially successful.
(Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/how-do-you-make-money-when-less-1-apps-are-financially-successful-1537962)
Around 102bn apps were downloaded in 2013, with 90% of these being downloaded from the Apple App Store and Google Play.
(Source: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2592315)

7 Reasons why companies’ go mobile-only,

The %conversion rate is higher in mobile than Desktop.
The Marketing expenses are minimal for Mobile Apps than Desktop.
To improve customer experience by easy navigation, clutter-free rich media.
Avoid distractions from competitors and keep-in-touch with customers via Push Notifications.
Covering the Tier II, Tier III customers, because the Smartphone users are more than Desktop users.
To make transactions on-the-go.
Easy performance Tracking, Competitor Analysis etc. → Data driven Decision, is more possible with Mobile Apps.

But my question is, many Indian consumers are still under 2G support only. For them, the mobile web version could be the better option to make purchases and we can’t expect them to download the App forcefully.

So, to achieve the marketing goals for mobile app, the Marketing team will rely more on TV Ads, Content(UGC) and Digital Marketing.

The Facebook Developers partnered with parse, made Applinks.org — An open source, cross platform solution to make App-to-App linking. All you need to do is, adding App link Metadata for the corresponding device type in your web pages to deep link with your App.

Sample Code:

File: documentation.html<html>
<head>
    <meta property="al:ios:url" content="applinks://docs" />
    <meta property="al:ios:app_store_id" content="12345" />
    <meta property="al:ios:app_name" content="App Links" />
    <meta property="al:android:url" content="applinks://docs" />
    <meta property="al:android:app_name" content="App Links" />
    <meta property="al:android:package" content="org.applinks" />
    <meta property="al:web:url"
          content="http://applinks.org/documentation" />
</head>
<body>
Hello, world!
</body>
</html>

Google too joined the race in it’s own way by making, expansive mobile search experience by allowing App indexing for all Android Apps in last Google I/O conference.

As predicted, it’s the headache for all SEO experts and Digital Marketing Agency. Probably this could be the endpoint of classic SEO(keywords, Metadata) and should be ready to move from SEO → ASO.

Is engaging your Mobile App, that easy?

It’s not that easy to rank your App on the top charts. It’s totally different scenario, you should look into multiple aspects, track performance and optimize towards it.

If you are an SEO Analyst moving towards ASO, you should look deep into these topics:

App Store Optimization
App Links
Google’s App Indexing
Bing — App Linking

Getting Started: App Store Optimization

The ASO, also has similar terms like SEO. It’s termed as,

On-Metadata ASO → Title(keywords), Description, Type & Category, Icon/Logo, Screenshots, App Video.
Off-Metadata ASO → Reviews, Ratings, App Downloads, Link Building.

Best ASO Tools, I found…

http://applinktest.appspot.com/ — For testing Android App URI.
AppAnnie.com — For measuring the App Analytics, Rankings.
App Snippet Preview — To preview your App Store Listings/Snippets before publishing or updating in App Store.
MobileDevHQ, SearchMan , SensorTower, Apptamin — Similar to AppAnnie. Keyword finder, tracking your App rankings, Analytics etc.

App Links

The main benefit of using App Links is, it’s open source, cross-platform supported and easy to implement. Still confusing? Read FAQ → http://applinks.org/faqs/

Getting an Overview: Google’s App Indexing

Just look into this image, the android app for Airbnb also indexing in Google SERPs and that will direct you into the App. Likewise, with the Google’s few lines of meta tags you can enable Google App indexing for your android app too.

Indexing App content in Google SERPs?

Googlebot which crawling web pages can also crawl and index the content in our Android App. ie., we can allow Googlebot to crawl the content in .APK file through the Google Play to index the app content. To achieve this, we should add link elements in our existing sitemap file (or) within <head> tag of all required web pages in the site.

Source: https://developer.android.com/training/app-indexing/enabling-app-indexing.html

When you have Website just add your URI schema and Route (path) to sitemaps as XML alternate. And even another idea is just adding to <head> head part of the HTML page so,that google Bot could easily crawl and fetch your app links for indexing.

Second way is, Consider you need to index app links directly as like submitting webpage url to Google bot,Google launched specific API called App indexing API to submit the stat usage and query directly to google from your app. So, this API is integrated with your Play Store service and Added with your android App and you can make API call what should be indexed in google and Autocomplete List.

Target Keyword, Title, (URL is optional) and App URI must be chosen and invoke call to google to notify that here is visitor for this particular URI.

App Indexing API aids Google to show results on Browsers / Autocomplete list on Google Now. Hence web page is not mandatory to index the particular resource from app.However App must support Deep Linking.

source: https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/webmasters/appindexingapi

But still, this thing should be worked out and see results. How it works without the web interface?

Whenever the user visits the app page, the indexing API gets invoked and data gets shared to google through google Play services and we must convey to user that the data is shared with google for optimizing the search results.

Note: As of now, Google supports App Indexing only for Android platform but “http://huffingtonpost.in” added tags for their iOS app too. So, soon we can expect Google’s App indexing for iOS apps too.

Bing’s App Linking: Resources

Bing’s App Linking Basics: http://www.bing.com/dev/en-us/applink
Bing’s App Linking — https://www.bing.com/webmaster/configure/app/linking
Bing’s App Linking: Developer Resources — https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn614167.aspx

Still, Google and Bing are doing their A/B testing with App Indexing. Get Subscribed! to get more updates about App Indexing and App Linking.