Following Twitter’s lead, Facebook is trying out a new feature designed to encourage users to read a link before sharing it. The test will reach 6% of Facebook’s Android users globally in a gradual rollout that aims to encourage “informed sharing” of news stories on the platform.

Users can still easily click through to share a given story, but the idea is that by adding friction to the experience, people might rethink their original impulses to share the kind of inflammatory content that currently dominates on the platform.

Twitter Will Now Ask If You Want to Read an Article Before Retweeting It

For the past couple of weeks or so, there has been a bug with some sites over HTTPs. The error is “Insufficient HTTPS coverage on your site” and it is a known bug with the report that Google will fix.

Unfortunately there's a bug there in Search Console. When we we show "Failing / Insufficient HTTPS coverage" in the Page experience report, that can just mean we don't have the full data (instead of saying "not enough data" we incorrectly say "failing"). We're fixing it.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 29, 2021

It's a bug. If there are no URLs reported on, then it's just that we don't have the data, and the UI incorrectly claims that the site is failing because of that. We're working on fixing that, sorry for the confusion!

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 7, 2021

Google said on Monday it has rolled out a range of updates to its Search, Maps, YouTube and Google Pay services in India to display and boost authoritative and credible information about the coronavirus to help people in the South Asian nation find vaccination centers and other resources to navigate the crisis. Google has announced a bunch of new changes recently here are some of the highlights:

• Displays information panels with vaccine registration details in India and highlights the official Indian government website for the vaccine at the top.
• Search and Maps that have been showing 2,500 testing centers in India now similarly also show locations of over 23,000 vaccination centers across the country in English and eight Indian languages.
• They are also testing a Q&A function in Google Maps in India to enable people to ask about and share local information on the availability of beds and medical oxygen in select locations in the country.

When it comes to lazy loaded content, John Mueller said GoogleBot tends not to watch out for a scroll event or a click to load more button. With this setup, lazy-loaded content, he said you will want to make sure to set up intersection observer so Google can use that to find your content.

Ryan Wyatt, the managing director of gaming and commerce at YouTube, shared on Twitter that, following requests from the community, YouTube is testing a so-called “subcriberss-only mode,” which will enable creators to host exclusive chats their subscribers.

The aim of the feature is to streamline chats to more dedicated fan groups.

Per a YouTube support post, the test is only available to “a small number of creators,” though the platform said it hopes to roll it out more fully in the future.

In a new letter, attorneys general representing 44 U.S. states and territories are pressuring Facebook to walk away from new plans to open Instagram to children. The company is working on an age-gated version of Instagram for kids under the age of 13 that would lure in young users who are currently not permitted to use the app, which was designed for adults.

“It appears that Facebook is not responding to a need, but instead creating one, as this platform appeals primarily to children who otherwise do not or would not have an Instagram account,” the coalition of attorneys general wrote, warning that an Instagram for kids would be “harmful for myriad reasons.”

In light of all the bad press and attention from lawmakers, it’s possible that the company may walk back its brazen plans to boost business by bringing more underage users into the fold.

You might start seeing a “Let Google help your business” option inside the GMB dashboard. This allows you to accept or reject these options:

• Accept automated calls that help keep your business details up to date
• Accept calls to help manage requests from customers

More info in their help documentation.

Related

More Users Start to See Google Duplex for Restaurant Reservations

The Google Ads Speculative and Experimental Medical Treatment policy has been updated to clarify that ads for cell or gene therapies are not allowed, regardless of regulatory approval status. There is no change to the effect of the policy.

Here is the updated policy:

Speculative and experimental medical treatment, cell therapies, and gene therapies

The following is not allowed:

❌ Promotion of speculative and/or experimental medical treatments.

Examples (non-exhaustive): Biohacking, do-it-yourself (DIY) genetic engineering products, gene therapy kits

❌Promotion of cell or gene therapies, regardless of regulatory approval status.

Examples (non-exhaustive): Stem cell therapy, cellular (non-stem) therapy, gene therapy and similar forms of regenerative medicine, platelet rich plasma

Violations of this policy do not lead to immediate account suspension without prior warning. A warning will be issued, at least 7 days, prior to any suspension of your account.

Google has just announced a new playbook (PDF) and design kit in Figma for you to help incorporate Web Stories into your website. They talk about showcasing web stories on your website using The Web Story Player and offers a few different options for it

• Singleton
• Carousal
• Compact display
• Author highlight
• Dedicated page

Search Console has changed the way that it evaluates and reports errors in Event structured data.

As a result, you may see small increases in the number of Event entities and issues reported for your property, as well as a change in severity of some issues from errors to warnings. Specifically, Search Console is now detecting Event entities at all hierarchy levels, not just at the root level, and errors in recommended properties are now flagged as warnings rather than errors.

If you have multiple Instagram accounts this can be a very handy time-saving feature for you. If you long-press the follow button, it gives you the option to choose all the other accounts you have (obviously that you have signed into from that device) and follow that user from all of those.

A simple tool to download data from your Search Console in CSV format. You will need to authorize it to access your Search Console data.

As SEOs, we love data (kind of) – but what’s more important than having data, is being able to cut, slice, analyse, and present it however you need to.

We think Sitebulb does a pretty good job of this already, but sometimes nothing else can quel that urge for a good spreadsheet.

Now we can just dump all of your data into a spreadsheet for you, sometimes that’s what you need. But with our Google Sheets exports, we get fancy…

• Grouped reports broken down into individual sheets & tabs
• Cross linking between sheets to drill down through your data
• Links from each issue, to supporting documentation
• Summary sheet to link everything together

As a tl;dr Marketing newsletter subscriber, you can get a free 60 day, extended Sitebulb trial licence here: Sitebulb.com/tldr

Spotify this morning announced new sharing features that broaden the way Spotify content, including both music and podcasts, can be shared across social media.

Spotify will now allow users to share a timestamped link to a podcast, which allows users to tune into a particular moment of the podcast episode. Previously, if you wanted to share a podcast episode, you could only post the link to the entire episode. But many times, people want to comment on or discuss a particular part of an episode. Now, they’ll be able to do so by using the “switch to share” feature at the current playtime, after tapping the “share” button while listening to the show.

With Spotify’s Canvas users are able to preview their social share across Instagram Stories and now Snapchat, to see how it will appear. Before today, Canvas art could only be shared to Instagram Stories.

The Schema.org version of Structured Data Markup Validator is now live in beta, might not be long before the Google version gets pulled out.

The folks at Sitebulb have created a handy Bookmarklet so you can quickly test a page in this new Schema.org Markup Validator with a click of a button.