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I can't seem to find any literature on expiring content with Android's App Indexing feature.

Let's say you have an app that shows users information on store sales. The store sales are time sensitive - they will eventually expire, and no longer be available. While the sale is available the user can see related search results because the app has used App Index to declare them. Eventually, the sale expires though. The content is presumably still in the App Index, but it's now dead from the perspective of the app.

How does one deal with this? Is there a way to explicitly remove content from App Index? Are App Index entries automatically expired if not declared again within a given timeframe?

Eric Schlenz
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2 Answers2

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The app index entries won't get expired on their own. They will be always visible in the history.google.com of that particular user. So you have to create a mechanism to gracefully handle your case. You can check for the timing in the code that handles the deep-link and take action according to that.

mohan mishra
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I believe the main question was how to remove deep links from App Indexing in the cases that the Web URLs linked is no longer available due to be time sensitive.

Now regarding your deep links to stop appearing in Google Search results, there are a few options to handle these time-sensitive issues:

1- Use the "unavailable_after" robots meta tag as explained here https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag?hl=en / https://googleblog.blogspot.it/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html

2- Add a noindex robots meta tag and inform Google about the page-change via the sitemap file

3- Just remove the page (or add a noindex), and Google will recrawl it after a while automatically.

Apart from this, I would recommend you to implement an exception handling for the cases that the App can not obtain any content from the server. You probably can use the HTTP error 404 for that.

Stan Ct
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