app indexing - how not to map all my website to the app

Question

I've been implementing google app indexing in my app, though it's turning out to be very hard for me to understand. I've created the following intent-filter in my app

        <intent-filter android:label="@string/app_name">
            <data android:scheme="android-app"
                android:host="com.towers.mywebsite" />
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
            <data android:scheme="http"
                android:host="www.mywebsite.com" />
            <data android:scheme="https"
                android:host="www.mywebsite.com" />
        </intent-filter>

I'd like to grab all the links like www.mywebsite.com?parameter=123 but NOT links like www.mywebsite.com/somethingelse

With the intent-filter above, my app is in the list of possible apps to open all the deep links like www.mywebsite.com...

My question is: am I doing it right? How am I supposed to filter the intent in order not to make all the links try and open tre app? I thought google would have chosen open-the-app-or-the-browser by checking which pages of my website do have the link rel attribute, but it seems like it only relies on my app intent-filter. Therefore, I need to tweak them in order to filter only the pages I want. How can I do that?

Thank you

Answer 1

You can rely on markups if you don't declare App-Website association. https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/android/app#declare-a-website-association

You can also try controlling indexing by creating noindex.xml file to specify the URLs you want excluded from the Google index. https://developers.google.com/app-indexing/android/app#noIndex

Cheers,

MB