After first launching the +1 button globally and announcing the Google+ project, folks at Google have “done it again”. They have incorporated new sets of reports related to social activity in both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools – these new reports will be available only for people using the new version of GA though.

Whether we are talking about a Facebook’s Like or a +1 in the search results, all these actions can be tracked with the help of new reports and moreover, anyone can measure what kind of impact social interactions have for a certain website. Here are the new social-related reports anyone would be able to track from their Analytics accounts:

1.       Social Actions Report

This is solely created with the purpose of seeing how many social actions a website has received; from +1s to Tweets and Likes, all will be available in this report.

2.      Social Engagement Report

With this new report a webmaster can see how users that share a page/website behave when browsing and also how users that do not share behave, and what are the differences between them in terms of clicks, bounce etc. One can add as many sharing buttons with some coding while the +1 report is already added.

3.      Social Pages Report

Want to find out which pages/blog posts on your website have the chances of becoming viral? With this report you will be able to see what pages and articles are driving the most social interactions, thus getting the feel of what your visitors like reading most. Highly important!

These are all great changes/improvements but yet again, the questions that are on most SEOs’ lips are:

-          Is this a clear sign that social interactions will influence SERPs in the near future?

-          How can Google make a difference between real social actions and manipulated ones?

Just a year before the first shares to be issued, which Facebook’s owners hope to attract over 100 billion dollars, the popular network has registered its first decline in the number of users in the U.S., Canada, UK and other mature markets, where this website is the number one site in the social networking industry. According to a report released by the Inside Facebook website, the network lost nearly 6 million users in the U.S. and around 1.52 million users in Canada May this year.

Despite the decreases in what seem to be already saturated markets, the network is still growing, especially in countries from Asia, South America and Africa. Also according to Inside Facebook, in early June there were registered over 687 million people and the numbers seems to be in a continuous growth worldwide.

According to some analysts, once Facebook reaches a market share of 50% of the population of a country the growth stops, but so far Facebook has managed to protect itself from significant declines. On the other hand, the social network spokes-persons said several times that the data provided by Inside Facebook is not real, the company continuing its upward trends in terms of growing its users in all countries.

However, it seems that more and more users choose to close their accounts, and according to PCWorld and The Telegraph there are some real motives why people are leaving Facebook, such as:

-          Privacy: people hate data leaks, facial recognition features and anything related to intimate data

-          Advertising: users started to being annoyed by excessive ads used on the social network

-          Future: any shared picture, any message, any video can become a threat in the future, not only for a person’s image but also in professional life

Whether or not Inside Facebook’s information is real, one thing is sure: this social network has managed to reach an impressive popularity level, but is this the highest place it can go?

ICANN, the organisation that manages Internet domain names, recently approved in Singapore a change that it is supposed to be “the next big thing after .com domain names appearance” – the appearance of new domain names for private companies. ICANN Board approved the usage of company names instead of the usual .com, .org and so on and this decision represents one of the most important evolution steps for the Internet environment in the recent years. Almost all ICANN members voted “pro” for this radical change.

Internet addresses can end with a company name from now on, instead of .Com, .Org or. Net. “This is the biggest change for domain names, since the appearance of .Com domains, 26 years ago…” said Theo Hnarakis, director of Melbourne IT Services, a company specialized in Internet services.

The measure is seen as a great opportunity for brands to get more control over their online presence and awareness and to get more visitors to their websites. However, this will not come for a cheap price: only for applying to get a new personalised gTLD, a company will have to pay no less than about £115,000. Taking about prices!

Companies that will benefit most from this huge change are brands with a clear marketing strategy and a customer-oriented one, added Hnarakis.

One big question that should have a clear answer in the following days is how this change will affect search engine optimisation, Google algorithms and companies’ positions in the search results? This could mean not only the beginning of a new era in domain names industry but also could bring some major changes in search engines’ algorithms.

Google search engine users can now do searches based on an image uploaded in the search field and can then reveal where it was made, the company said in a conference on Internet search. In addition, Chrome users will soon be able to search by voice on the Internet, however this being available only for English language. Furthermore, Google also introduced the application that basically anticipates what web page an user will want to open and will load it before even before the user will click on it. Quite interesting features, right?

One of the most important news is however the Google search based on an uploaded image. Once the image will be searched for, Google will analyse its details and according to the company it will reveal where that picture was taken or what popular buildings appear in it. The company mentioned that they will not use facial recognition technology for this new feature. As with any new application, Google folks mentioned that more work/development is needed and in its early stages the results might not be too great.

For more than two years, Android’s Goggles application can be used by smartphone’ users for finding out more information about a certain place/building, based on existing images from the Internet. For desktop users however this would be the first application ever created, and this are becoming more and more interesting for the near future.

Chrome browser users can soon search Google only by using a microphone and saying what they want to find out. Yet again, the service will be first available only in English, but Google says that the number of languages ​​in which searches can be made will increase in the future. The guys at Google say they have worked hard for two years in this area of research so that in the near future things to be changed related to how users search the Internet (the voice search service is available for smartphones).

Social bookmarking, as defined, is a method of saving and sharing favourite websites or just posts of a website to another site that anyone connected to Internet can access it, view and vote. Voting is the most important aspect while as the number of votes increases the more chances of hitting “most popular bookmarks” page which translates into a flood of traffic that can be for a short time or that can become regular readers.

Social bookmarking is associated with viral marketing or link baiting and in a way it’s almost the same thing: a links is shared, the story becomes popular getting more and more votes, the word is spreading and it can become a fantastic way of marketing a site. From traffic perspective, this is extraordinary, but how important is this for search engine optimisation?

Although lately many bookmarking sites have changed their policy into adding nofollow to outbound links, whenever an article/site is bookmarked that very website gets a link from an authority and popular site. This might seem as a great way of link building but as other great methods can have a negative aspects, this should not be over-used as well, as spamming it.

Another positive aspect of social bookmarking sites is that bookmarking definitely increase the time for search engines to index a new page or a new blog post recently added. Last, but not least, another trick most people seem to forget is using tags when bookmarking a website while tags might help the targeted keywords to rank higher.

Although one should not create an entire SEO campaign based on this method, it would be best to include it in the “to-do list” for promoting a website and ranking it as high as possible in the end.

Or better, allow the experts from WebCreationUK to apply their Advanced SEO Programme and skyrocket your website to the top.

Even if the majority of users do not notice any difference in the future, recently major Internet players have tested how the new version of IP protocols – IPv6 -works. Basically, the IPv6 will create an almost unlimited number of IP addresses. The protocol used nowadays allows the creation of up to 4.3 billion IP addresses, number that it is almost reached, therefore Internet providers must invest in both hardware and software to move to IPv6. However, there isn’t a deadline for this and the current protocol is expected to be used by the end of the decade.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube and Meebo are some large companies that have tested the new protocol on 8^th of June. World IPv6 Day event aimed to figure out how the new protocol will work in the future, but this change will take place gradually in the coming years.

In the beginning of the Internet it was believed that 4.3 billion IP addresses will be more than enough and that there will not be needed more. However, with its development (which is nowadays used across multiple devices) there is a need to supplement the number of available IP addresses and it seems that IPv6 is the solution.

Operating systems already support the protocol version 6, but for this transition Internet providers must invest in software and hardware equipment, such as, in rare cases, routers. The problems posed by migration relate to the special configuration for the new protocol and the coexistence of the two protocols.

There are voices saying that the market transition to IPv6 is complex in terms of software implementation, testing and maintenance. However, since there is no deadline, companies will be able to adapt to these changes in time.

Migrating to IPv6 is not a matter of urgency and will not happen overnight. The Internet will continue to work, but its growth will be much slower if the transition will be prolonged more.