How to: Link your app to search results using Applinks.org markups

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Published date: February 25, 2015

By linking apps to your web content, it will help promote organic discovery of your app and enable users to consume your content in your app through deep linking.

Enable Bing App Linking with applinks.org markup

  1. Applinks.org markup provides Cortana with the routing information required by your app to navigate to a deep position.

  2. Tag in the HTML for your content. Apps that link to your content can then use this metadata to deep-link into your app, take users to an app store to download the app, or take them directly to the web to view the content. This allows developers to provide the best possible experience for their users when linking to their content.

  3. You need to add platform specific applinks.org markup to represent the details of your Windows/Windows Phone apps. Each target platform requires a different set of metadata in order to provide enough context for one app to deep-link into another.

  4. App Links are specified using the tags defined in the meta property. Developer requirements are provided in the following links: applinks.org action markup.

<html>
  <head>
    <meta property="al:windows:url" content=“foolinks://docs"/> 
      <meta property="al:windows:app_id" content="115b13de-2d8e-4c70-9a36-dfd2c6a7a923"/>
      <meta property="al:windows:app_name" content=“Foo App" /> 
      <meta property="al:windows:package" content=“Foo.Fooapp_54ggd3ev8bvz6"/> 
      <meta property="al:windows_phone:url" content=“foolinks://docs"/> 
      <meta property="al:windows_phone:app_name" content=“Foo App"/> 
      <meta property="al:windows_phone:package" content=“Foo.Fooapp"/>
      <meta property="al:web:url" content="http://applinks.org/documentation" /> 
  </head>
  <body>
Hello, world!
</body>
</html>

Next steps

Once you have enabled App Linking, links to your app will start appearing in search results as the connection propagates through Bing. This usually takes a few days. Optionally, you can now implement deep linking with App Link Navigation Protocol markups, which creates deep links into your app content when the corresponding pages in your web site appear in search results. To get started, add deep linking markup to your web page as described in App Link Navigation Protocol. In addtion, you need to enable apps to handle deeplinking with URI Activation.

Additional resources