Today In SEO & Search News: February 15, 2017

Today In SEO & Search News: February 15, 2017

It’s been a busy 48 hours in search and SEO and Valentine’s Day and actual work prohibited me from posting yesterday so we’ve got a lot of ground to get through.  So let’s jump right in …

Google Adds Fun Facts

penguin fun facts
This may not be too helpful for most of us outside of providing entertainment but Amy Gesenhues over at Search Engine Land today reported on the addition of a new feature on Google.  At the end of any animal, plant, fruit or vegetable query you can now simply add “fun fact” and it’ll produce just that.

Jenny Halasz On Mobile SEO
Jenny Halasz hoster a Q&A webinar for Search Engine Journal and answers some great questions that everyone should understand (or at least – everyone who cares about ranking on mobile). It’s a great video and she hosts regular “Ask An SEO” columns so well-worth your time and a quick follow if you ever have good questions you’d like answered.

Changes To Facebook Video
As Danny Goodwin over at Search Engine Journal reports – Facebook is changing the way videos play.  There are the four big changes:

  1. News feed videos will now autoplay with sound. I think this is a horrible idea and as Danny puts it to Facebook’s comment that people want and expect it, “Really? Who are these people? Is this an alternative fact?”
  2. Vertical videos will now more easily expand to full screen.
  3. Picture-In-Picture has been added so you can now watch a video while scrolling through the rest of your news feed.  Because our attention spans weren’t shortened enough with mobile. 😉
  4. A new apps for your TV will let you watch video from your friends, pages and just recommended on your Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV or Samsung Smart TV.

SEO For Amazon Alexa
There’s a lot of talk about Google Home among SEOs but Robyn Johnson wrote an interesting piece for Search Engine Journal on how to optimize for Alexa.

Time To A Location Can Impact Rankings
Bill Slawski wrote an interesting analysis over on SEO By The Sea on a recent patent granted to Google.  As always it’s highly recommended to just read his analysis but the Cliff Notes is – the “time investment” to a location can impact how well it ranks.  He likes this to a patent he analyzed last week “Google May Check to See if People Go to Geographic Locations Google May Recommend“.  This is definitely something they’re interested in and something we need to take seriously.

Emojis Are Back In The SERPs
The return of the emoji.  Barry Schwartz reported over on Search Engine Roundtable about the return of the emoji to the SERPs.  They were dropped a couple years ago but you can see them once more.

Emoji in Google SERPs

TensorFlow 1.0 Released
At the TensorFlow Dev Summit today Google announced the release of version 1.0.  TensorFlow is an Open Source framework for deep learning. Basically this means it’s ready for the prime time.  I was only able to watch part of the livestream but Venture Beat did a great write-up of it including the new tools, integrations and a planned release of some code reported to multiply the speed it functions at.  It was a huge summit and the future of machine learning just got kicked up a notch.