Today In SEO & Search News: February 1, 2017

It's important to keep up with what's going on in the SEO realm and to do that I find myself reviewing the news each and every day and not surprisingly, there are important things going on in the industry as often. To assist our valued readers I like to share my top SEO and search news with you each day. And here's today's top stories: The Desktop Isn't Dying Christi Olsen over at Search Engine Land covered a study from Gartner and while sometimes I'd just read and link to the release and findings themselves, Christi did a great job of putting together the Cliff Notes. In short - the desktop has very specific times it's far higher in usage than phones or tablets and conversions are still completed there. User Pet Peeves Josh McCoy over on Search Engine Journal wrote a great piece on user pet peeves. He not only discusses what the pet peeves are but carries that forward into lessons on how to tell their impact and what to do about it. There's some good actionable advice in the article for virtually everyone. Moz Adds Prospect Behavior Tracking After Google's announcement a few weeks ago that their Google My Business Insights data was going to be accessible via API the Moz team apparently got right to work as their local options now include this data.  I'll let you read their post to get all the details but this allows Moz Local clients to see data such as the number of map views, the number of searches they appear for, the number of actions, etc. Here's what it looks like in the back end (image from Moz): Facebook Changing How It Ranks Stories Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Journal reported on Facebook announcement that they're changing the way they rank stories in not one but two ways. At it's core here are the two changes:

• Facebook is adding new signals to get authentic stories to appear higher in your feed. Basically they, re doing a lot of what they should have been doing and looking at spam signals.
• They're updating their real-time signals to adjust story rankings faster and based on interest at that time.

Google Home Can Help You Find Your Stuff Kristin Wong over at Life Hacker reported on a helpful feature in Google Home I didn't know about. You can ask the device to remember where your things are. To use the example in the video from Taylor Martin at CNET, you can tell the device “OK Google, remember that I put my passport in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet.” and if you ever forget you simply need to ask it. You can even tell it to forget.

This is probably my new favorite Google Home feature. pic.twitter.com/qPi6upZl7z

— Taylor Martin (@caspertek) January 25, 2017

And that's it for the top stories over the past 24 hours. If you know of any you think I missed feel free to add them in the comments below.