If you’ve been advertising with Google AdWords for a little while, you probably have a handle on the basics of Quality Score: what it is, what it does, how it’s calculated, and how it affects your campaign performance and costs. If you don’t fully understand the fundamentals of Quality Score , there are plenty of beginner resources out there for you.

In order for companies to realize the maximum benefit and impact from social media marketing, the pre requisite for goal setting must be a certain level of understanding about the nature of online communities, social media sharing web sites and applications.  Unrealistic expectations based on a lack of knowledge about the social web is far too expensive to ignore.

Google has quickly tried to counter Bing and Facebook’s social search announcement by integrating social shares into their main search results. As you can see in this screenshot, there is a “Shared by 20+” notation next to the name of the website and number of related articles. Click to read the rest of this post..

Canada’s privacy commissioner yesterday declared that Google violated the country’s privacy laws, which followed news that Spain’s Data Protection Agency plans to fine Google between €60,000 and €600,000 ($84,000 and $840,000) per offense due to the Wi-Fi data Google collected with its Street View cars. Click to read the rest of this post..

Bidding on the same keywords without a collaborative strategy spells risk for internal competing brands. Not only can it result in one brand stealing potential clicks and traffic from another, but it also can drive up the CPCs for both

Here’s a roundup of today’s live blogging and coverage of SES Chicago 2010.

A new Google project, Google Demo Slam , will be unveiled tomorrow. No word yet on what exactly it is, and the Flash website offers only a few vague clues thus far: “Technology is awesome.

Last month we took a look at identifying some ways to leverage targeting options and automated algorithms to ensure your paid search campaigns are well optimized. Now its time to up-level your optimization efforts by considering media other than paid search. *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web….

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Faces Spanish Lawsuit Over Street View Data Collection Data protection officials in Spain have filed a lawsuit over Google’s collection of Wi-Fi data earlier this year as part of its Street View product. *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***