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Google Adds Additional Ranking Boost For Using App Indexing API

Google announced a new ranking boost for App Indexing, as well as a new iOS indexing protocol and Search Console features.

Barry Schwartz on September 30, 2015 at 3:28 pm

Mariya Moeva, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced today at SMX East that in addition to the app ranking boost Google announced on February 26, 2015, Google has launched an additional ranking boost for those apps that utilize the new App Indexing API.

Mariya explained that when an app utilizes this new API, Google is able to gather additional engagement data from that app to help determine how useful the app is to users.

Google has not yet published a blog post announcing this. Mariya said that is because all of this is changing incredibly quickly. In addition to the new ranking boost for using the App Indexing API, Google announced a few more things around app indexing at SMX East:

New iOS Google Indexing Documentation

Google also came out with a brand new set of documentation today around iOS app indexing. The new documentation can be found here and works nicely with the new iOS 9 operating system.

We hope to have more on the new iOS app indexing documentation from Google soon.

New Search Console Features For App Indexing

The Google Search Console has some new beta features that App Indexing developers can play with including:

(1) The ability to segment out Search Analytics data based on clicks on the search result links versus clicking on the install app button.

(2) The ability to fetch as Google not just using the APK version published on Google Play, but also by uploading an unpublished APK version directly through the fetch as Google feature.

(3) The fetch as Google results will now also show the complete API response including title, description, API URL and more.

These are some of the new announcements from Google around App Indexing today.

If you want to be a beta tester, please fill out the form at http://g.co/SearchConsoleTester.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.