Google announced yesterday at SMX East, as I broke at Search Engine Land yesterday, a new ranking factor (benefit) for those who deploy mobile apps but use the new App Indexing API.
On the panel, Mariya Moeva from Google announced several things around App Indexing, but got everyone's attention pretty quickly when she announced there is an additional ranking boost, on top of the original app ranking boost, for using the App Indexing API.
Why is there a new boost? Mariya explained that with the new API, Google is able to know start and end times of use of the app and pages within the app, amongst other important data points.
In addition to this, Google also released brand new Google iOS App indexing documentation based on the new iOS 9 protocols. So check that out immediately.
Plus Google released three new things in the Google Search Console around App Indexing:
(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(2) The ability to fetch as Google not just using the APK version published on Google Play, but also by uploading an unpublished APK version directly through the fetch as Google feature.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.
FYI - I have already begun building an incredibly detailed app for this site, with all the app indexing. So I'll share all my data with you as we deploy it.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
