Linking to my app product page gives "Not Available for bots to index"
What is the proper syntax to place a href link to the product so that users online can view it as html?
3 Answers
I encountered the same issue half an hour ago, but it seems recovered now.
If you own an app, you can confirm Product identity in Partner Center:
You can share the direct link and Store ID to help customers find your app in the Store:
- URL: https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/*12CharsAppId*
- Store ID: 12CharsAppId
- Store protocol link: ms-windows-store://pdp/?productid=12CharsAppId
The above address would be recommended but the apps.microsoft.com URL should also work.
I don't have a final solution, just a workaround.
We've been seeing the same issue with our own app for the past few days and we've started seeing reports of people encountering this with all kinds of apps, including even Microsoft's own AppInstaller. It seems to be a server-side rate-limiting/caching issue at Microsoft as changing anything in the URL fixes the problem temporarily -- only to get back to the same issue a few hours later. We also found that VPN-ing to some locations (mostly to the US) helped as well, and this throttling seems to be specific to an app & an availability region (when it got blocked, it blocked across all Europe, but not in US for example). It seems to come & go as we have not seen a big drop in new install counts.
As a temporary solution we ended up adding a random string to the end of the URL. We used GCLID as we found it to be the least offensive way -- it could just as well be a legitimate tracking ID we pass over. So now the URL we link to looks like this:
https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/[APPNAME]/[APPID]?gclid=f-3579a28842a7bcac7ba630d698829e9b
Where the "f-xxxx" value is generated using the md5() of the timestamp -- but it could be any ever-changing value, even a random number.
We've reached out to our MS contact about this but we haven't heard back yet.
I work on apps.microsoft.com. I can confirm that there was an issue on our end that appeared on August 23. This issue has been resolved.
And the proper link, of course, is this:
- https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/[your product id here]
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