SEO: The Amazon Android AppStore

SEO: The Amazon Android AppStore

I just took a quick look at the new Amazon Android AppStore to see how they are doing on SEO.  I was happy to see that they have done a pretty good job, especially when compared to the Andorid Marketplace, which has only recently added unique, indexiable urls for the apps in their store, so that they can be accessed by the web, outside of the application downloader.

For Amazon Mobile SEO in the App Store, here is what I found:

Here is a Summary:

• They appear to have two versions of the traditional page. One could be a special promo page, because the app that I am using as an example is a top downloaded app, mentioned on the start page for the store.
• They do have a canonical page set on the traditional versions of the page. Both versions of the traditional page reference one url as canonical.
• Both of the traditional page urls are using user-agent detection and redirection so that when they are viewed on a mobile phone, they redirect to the mobile url.
• The traditional pages have really large bulky embedded stylesheets at the top of the page. This is a big no-no for modern web development, and especially mobile development. Since the embedded styling is on the traditional page, it is not quite as much a concern for us.
• The mobile page does not have an embedded style sheet. Good for them!
• The mobile url is very under-optimized, with no keywords in it at all. Also, the redirection command is sometimes passed in the address bar as: “?redirect=true&ref_=cm_sw_r_sms_app_fad_m”
• They have not set up a specific mobile subdomain or subdirectory for the mobile content. This could make it harder for the search engines to understand that it is not duplicate content, or know when to rank the different versions of the page.
• Both pages contain no written description of the application at the top of the page – only links for images. In both cases, the app description is very far down on the page.

Check the Mobile SEO for Yourself!

If you want to check any of this for yourself, or to see if it is still true, here are all the urls:

Traditional-Canonical: http://www.amazon.com/Mobestream-Media-Inc-Reward-Cards/dp/B004IPZYJU

Traditional-NonCanonical: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/
B004IPZYJU/ref=cm_sw_em_r_app_fad_m

Mobile: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B004IPZYJU/
ref=redir_mdp_mobile/190-2019229-9442749?
redirect=true&ref_=cm_sw_r_sms_app_fad_m

Below you will see an example of a self-referencing canonical tag. This has become a Best Practice for all web development, because it is a quick way to automatically prevent duplicate indexing by the search engines when parameters are added to the end of a url. In the mobile world, this also makes it easier to use transcoding services that re-format traditional content for mobile viewing automatically. When the self-referencing canonical tag is in place, the newly created mobile pages will at least pass SEO value back to the traditional page, even if they are on under-optimized urls, or simply don’t have enough power to rank well on their own.