: Different host path for web and android for app indexing As per google's recommendation we use following meta tag for android application indexing: android-app://<package_name>/<scheme>/<host_path>

Posted in: #Android #Deeplinks #Seo #WebCrawlers

As per google's recommendation we use following meta tag for android application indexing:

android-app://<package_name>/<scheme>/<host_path>

Example :

<link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.example.android/example/gizmos" />

Here does the host_path necessarily be equal to my web host path?

Example if i have web urls like : example.com/product-detail/product1 www.example.com/product-detail/product2 example.com/product-detail/product3 .
.
.

My alternate for app currently are:

<link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.example.android/example/product-detail/product1" />
<link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.example.android/example/product-detail/product2" />
<link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.example.android/example/product-detail/product3" />

..
.
.

Now my application get hosts as product-detail/product1,product-detail/product2 . . . and it parse that to get the product, make http call and render screen inside application.

I want my alternate to be of form

<link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.example.android/example/product-detail/?params={product_id='1'}" />
<link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.example.android/example/product-detail/?params={product_id='2'}" />
<link rel="alternate" href="android-app://com.example.android/example/product-detail/?params={product_id='3'}"
/>

Does it have any seo penalty for having different hosts for android and web or that would not make any difference w.r.t seo and hence help us gain flexibility over the dev/maintenance of web to app linking as we can now pass whole data in json to app and then app can consume that without parsing the url.