As SEO rapidly becomes a core task for local business owners, there’s a new temptation to build advertising messages or tracking mechanisms into business listings on the web. Typically, this might mean adding a slogan or campaign tagline to a business name or changing an office address to appear local to more customers. Unfortunately, this misguided enthusiasm can negatively impact the way search engines rank local business listings based on variations in company name, address and phone number (NAP, for short).

MANILA, Philippines – A free advertising service has been launched by a giant Internet company to raise income for the country’s micro, small and medium-scale enterprises (MSMEs) through online websites, an official of the firm said Tuesday. Over 25 million Filipinos and over a billion people worldwide use the Internet and search engines to find detailed information on products and services they want to buy offline or an offline-online-offline buyer mentality – thus, paving the way for local SMEs to grow their business via the Internet, said Derek Callow, marketing head of Google Southeast Asia.

More often than not, when something is successful overseas, it's even more successful in its home market. And this led one person to wonder: if Facebook receives one-seventh of all page views in the UK (as Hitwise suggested last week), how's it doing in the US? He found that it might receive as many as one-fourth of all page views. Perry DrakeThis isn't quite an apples-to-apples comparison. Think of it as Golden Delicious versus Red Delicious apples, at least, since Perry Drake, who's the vice president of Drake Direct and an associate professor at New York University, used Compete statistics to look at Facebook's US standing. Anyway, Drake supplied the graph you can see below (sorry for the blurriness - we enlarged it) and wrote, "In the US Facebook accounts for, now get this, 1 in every 4 or 25% of our total pageviews. Unbelievable! Google on the other hand accounts for only 8% of the total pageviews (or 1 in 12)."

Google announced that its Google Custom Search tool, which enables website owners to add customized search boxes to their pages, now formats query results for mobile phones. "If you own a web site and add a Google Custom Search box to it, when your users access the site on an Android-powered phone, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Palm Pre, they will see optimized search results formatted for these devices," writes Google Search group product manager Rajat Mukherjee on the Official Google Mobile Blog. "When they search on your website, they are redirected to a Google-hosted Custom Search results page created specifically for your Custom Search engine. If you'd like to serve these mobile results from your own web site, you can host your own version of the mobile Custom Search home page."

Today, we're announcing a new set of Google Analytics features which builds on last year's enterprise-class feature launch. Some add more power to existing capabilities. Others provide new flexibility to further customize and adapt Google Analytics according to the needs of your enterprise. Finally, we'll introduce Analytics Intelligence. Resist the temptation to skip ahead. We wouldn't want you to miss anything. :-)

Some of you may have noticed lately that Technorati has undergone a redesign, and they've changed the way they calculate Authority. Like we do with PostRank -- ahem -- they now focus on the past 30 days' worth of activity when counting links. It's a good move, and we like their idea for a new Topical Authority measure. The bad news is that they're cutting off their existing API this weekend.

This year after Ebay sold 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion and regardless they seem to be unstoppable. But is this a short rise that will deaply stagger down. Personally I think that with over half a million users it’s very difficult to go backwards. I mean that is roughly 8.3% of the worlds population of 6 billion people. Together with the legal battle Ebay are facing and the fight for Skype , Ebay are doing all they can to keep the user base up so that they will have some chance at winning their case. But what I find most interesting about all this is that they are being sued for the GI software source code which Skype is running off and that they have not paid for the license and have modified the code. It sounds like a real rat race to me. It always seems big companies are being sued when they are on the rise or when they are doing extremly well. This means that they have more money to be sued with. They obviously were patient enough to wait up until now. What are your predictions?