Back in February, Google announced two major mobile ranking signals back in February. The one that got the most attention and the nickname “Mobilegeddon” was a site’s “mobile-friendliness”. The other one was app indexing. Google would show content from apps to users when they had the apps installed.
READ: How To Set Up App Indexing For Ranking In Google
In April, Google announced that it had indexed 30 billion links within apps and that it would start showing Android users apps in search results even if the user doesn’t already have the app installed.
In July, we learned that Etsy sellers were seeing significant benefits from the signal, and they’re surely not alone.
Now, Google reportedly adding a new ranking factor for apps that use the App Indexing API. This was announced at the SMX East conference. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reports:
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.
At first, Google only made app indexing available on Android, but in May, they started indexing some iOS app content.
This week, the company posted new documentation for that, which you can find here.
Image via Google