First, a tip of the cap to Jenn and Robert and everyone at Search Engine Guide, whose blog just became even more valuable this week with the enabling of comments. Sweet!

Now, on to the links….

My wife and I started a home-based business back in 2003, and we closed the business within 8 months. Talk about a learning experience! That experience is why I can relate to TheStreet.com’s Ten Reasons Why Small Businesses Fail.

Having much better fortune than we did is Chloe Spencer, the 16-year-old daughter of Stephan Spencer. Chloe passed on babysitting and paper routes and instead started a blog about Neopets, and is now pulling in $700-plus per month in revenue. Nice! I told my 9-year-old son about this and asked if he’s ready to start blogging … he’s still thinking on it.

Lots of interesting news this week, and since I don’t generally cover news on SBS, the Link-o-rama is a perfect place to archive this:

• I’m intrigued by Barry’s report on the Roundtable that Google Counts Links within Word Documents. It’s one of those things that make you go “Hmmmmm….”
• Barry again: It’s Not Just Google That Treats Underscores Like Dashes
• Greg Sterling: Local Search Gaining, Driving Offline Transactions
• Mike Blumenthal reports on widespread spam at Google Maps and follows-up with an IM interview with one of the CEOs of the companies involved.

Google is taking away the “supplemental” label from all of us overly obsessive search marketers, but Jim Boykin has some ideas on How to Find if a Page is in Google’s Secret Supplemental Results. Hey, if it looks like a supplemental listing and walks like a supplemental….right?

For you business bloggers out there, Vanessa Fox has taken her BlogHer conference presentation and turned it into a gem of post series: the power of search: driving traffic to your blog (a BlogHer recap).

I love creative link building posts, and Deb Mastaler wrote this week about some potential link opportunities at major newspaper Web sites.

And last, but not least… Bob Chandra has a great guest post on Greg Sterling’s blog about an ongoing challenge for local/social sites: How do they gain traction outside the “big cities”?

That’s all for this week - have a great weekend!

Now playing: “Miracle Drug (live)”, U2