Mobile and App Indexing Affects Google Ranking
As we’ve mentioned before, mobile-friendliness has become one of the most important factors to boost a site’s approachability and usability. This has simply got to do with the fact that more and more people are on their mobile phones searching for information on the go. It’s not hard to predict that this trend will only intensify without ever looking back. And now there is an even bigger reason to make your site mobile-friendly: Google.
Recently, Google officially announced that its mobile ranking algorithm will include mobile-friendliness and app indexing. This is a significant change that will alter the search algorithm for mobile search result rankings. Mobile-friendliness is a pretty straightforward concept, which aims to make a site more searchable and approachable through mobile.
App Indexing is one of those implementations that make you pleasantly surprised at their usefulness and at the fact that they didn’t exist until now. We’re all aware of the existence of the myriad algorithms and inventions that Google comes up with in order to rank sites accurately. App Indexing allows Google index apps as though they are websites. Simply put, it is just an extension of these algorithms into the domain of apps. Once an app is listed in the Google index, deep links to the app can appear in Google Search results, which lets users get to the native mobile experience quickly, landing on the specific content they searched for instead of the general home page.
If you think about it, one can think of many times where a search for specific aspects or functions within apps often came to naught. With these changes, Google says, “users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.” What this does for app developers is that it puts good quality apps to the forefront ahead of the heap of chaff that stands between them and users.
Although App Indexing is only available for Android apps for the moment, the changes in app ranking factors have already kicked in, and mobile-friendly factors will start affecting rankings starting in April.
