Google Crawl Error > apple-app-site-association > No App, URL or attempt to link > Why?

Question

I have:

• a simple static website;

• hosted on a shared server;

• with SSL;

• which I have recently redesigned.

Google tells me there were two url crawl errors for my website:

1. apple-app-site-association;

2. .well-known/apple-app-site-association

For reference, here is the error report for the first (the second is the same):

Not found

URL:

https://mywebsite.com/apple-app-site-association

Error details

Last crawled: 5/5/16

First detected: 5/5/16

Googlebot couldn't crawl this URL because it points to a non-existent page. Generally, 404s don't harm your site's performance in search, but you can use them to help improve the user experience. Learn more

From looking around here, these appear to be related to associating an apple app with related website.

I have never tried to implement any sort of "apple app / site association" - at least not intentionally.

I can't for the life of me figure out where these links are coming from.

I will be removing these urls but am concerned the error may arise again.

I have looked at several related questions here, but they seem to be for errors from people trying to make that verification - which I haven't - or from people querying why their server logs show requests to these urls.

Can anyone shed any light on why this is happening?

Answer 1

So the answer is that Googlebot is now searching for these urls when they crawl your site, and as part of their effort to map associations between sites and their related apps. See: https://firebase.google.com/docs/app-indexing/ios/app

It seems that Googlebot hasn't (at this time) been told not to return a crawl error if the url /folder is not there.

Here is a link to an answer to a very similar (but slightly different) question that gives more detail if you are so inclined: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35812024/4806086