I covered this news at Search Engine Land last week, but now it is making its way to the SEO community.
Bing is beginning to build their index of native app content for iOS, Android and even their own Windows 10 apps, for search and discoverability purposes.
Bing said:
Now that we’ve seen how to apply app linking and app actions using markup, you may wonder when it is a good time to start to do this for you site. Well, we’ve already started analyzing the web specifically for App Links and actions markup to support the build up a massive index of apps and app actions, so the time start using app linking and schema.org actions and get an edge is now.We’re also already in the process of bringing this apps and actions intelligence to Bing and Bing-powered search results including Cortana and Windows 10 and we will have more to share later. In fact, look for an upcoming post on how we will start applying this to our results soon.
As you know, Google has actually done a lot of this but just for Android. Google does not yet support iOS or Windows 10. I suspect Google is already experimenting with indexing iOS app content. Bing tells us they are doing this now, but while Google is showing App content in mobile search, Bing has not yet done so.
Bing launched a tool named Applinks Markup Tester to help you with the markup. They also said you can use applinks.org to build your native markup for both iOS and Android - which is not how Google works exactly.
In any event, if you are building apps, you likely want to explore app indexing.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
