Five most interesting search marketing news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week we have as many updates from Google as you can stand and some hilarious/depressing social shenanigans.

Let Google take care of you, there there, this won’t hurt a bit

Dr Google is on the ward and ready to roll out a few new procedures. According to a blog post this week the FIND A TERM OTHER THAN ‘SEARCH GIANT will provide searchers with immediate medical advice in its Knowledge Graph answer box when searchers type in particular symptom queries, which apparently accounts for 1% of all search terms.

Now I was fully prepared to suggest this was a terrible idea, but as anyone who suffers from health anxiety can attest, the internet is a terrifying place when it comes to self-diagnosis.

Every search for even the most minor of ailment tends to lead to a cancer diagnosis. However Google recognises this fact and is working with trusted doctors and high quality medical information to bring you these results.

Rather than this guy…

Google Analytics will now warn you about Hackers

According to its Webmaster Central Blog and following on from the launch of Safe Browsing, a service that warns users of malware or phishing attacks, Google will expand its set of alerts in Google Analytics by adding notifications about sites hacked for spam in violation of its Webmaster Guidelines.

“In the unlikely event of your site being compromised by a third party, the alert will flag the affected domain right within the Google Analytics UI and will point you to resources to help you resolve the issue.”

Google also revealed that it has seen a 180% increase in sites hacked for spam compared to the previous year, however direct contact with website owners increases the likelihood of a fix by 75%.

Google won’t however warn you about watching the movie Hackers, there are plenty of other online resources for that, most of which will tell you it’s dated horribly.

And it really has.

Search Console adds new ‘rich results’ filter

Following on from the addition of a rich cards section to its Search Console service, Google has now also added a ‘rich result’ filter to its Search Analytics.

Just navigate to Search Traffic>Search Analytics, then click on Search Appearance filter to select the ‘rich result’ option.

This will tell you how well your rich snippets and cards are doing in terms of impressions, clicks, CTR and position.

Thanks to Danny Sullivan over at SEJ for the info and screen grab.

Facebook is testing a new way to make damn sure your friends see your posts

As I reported earlier in the week, Facebook has been trialling out a new way of notifying your friends directly about your status updates.

Although only rolled out to a handful of people in the UK, Canada and Spain, this is an interesting experiment, that means you can nudge up to 10 of your friends and say, “Hey look at me, why don’t you pay attention to me anymore? Is it because of spammy behaviour such as this?”

We’ll see how long it lasts.

Just because they’re sharing, it doesn’t mean they’re reading

And finally that hilarious/depressing research I warned you about. As reported by us this week, research has revealed that only 41% of people actually read the links they share on social.

Basically 6 out of 10 people just click retweet upon seeing a headline (and less than only 140 characters of context) and nothing more.

Despicable behaviour I’m sure you’ll agree.

Thankfully we here at SEW have incredibly attentive readers who will conscientiously read every single word we write before sharing it, and who are also incredibly attractive, brave, generous and I think I can wrap this up here, nobody will notice if I just fill the rest of my word count with some ‘hipster ipsum.’

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