MSN has just launched its version of local search, now in beta. To use this feature, visit the MSN Local Search page by visiting search.msn.com, select Local from the drop down menu, or through a direct link (see below).

You can use MSN Local Search by entering what you’re looking for, such as a business name or place of interest in the search box. The results are based on your default location setting, which you can modify by cilcking on Settings, just blow the search box. The settings are saved on local cookies so your configuration will be saved for next queries.

Alternatively, you can enter both what and where you want to find it (city, state or zip code).

MSN Search is one of the biggest search engines besides Google and Yahoo. It is probably worth your time to list your business with it.

Here’s again the link to MSN Local search.

Rand Fishkin has a summary of the conversation at SEOChat and e-mail debate about the types of promotional methods that are acceptable to use. Mick Sawyer stands on black-hat optimization tactics, while Rand Fiskin debates over the benefits of being white-hat.

Included is the chart of spam site’s unique visitors, which shows that the site receive more than 1,000 unique visitors for more than a month, with the peak (8,654 unique visitors per day) only two weeks after the existence. Mick claims to earn just under $2000 for that particular site.

Rand is being cautious by not calling site spamming immoral or unethical. I tend to agree with him but not this one. Comment spamming in blogs wastes the bloggers’ resources in form of time, space, and bandwidth. It decreases the value of the blogs by linking to low value web sites, which is bad for both search engines and human visitors.

Read the whole debate at SEOmoz.org.

Tim Mayer has announced on Yahoo! Search blog that there will be a major update to its index this evening. Webmasters should be seeing more pages in the index as well as some fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches.

It’s nice to see some one at Yahoo! communicates with users and webmasters like this. I would say that if you’ve been working hard enough, prepare to see exciting results. As with any update, there will be many bad pages disappear, and unfortunately some good ones too.

Via Yahoo Search blog.

Roger Wehbe of Yooter InterActive marketing decided to set up a satirical site to draw attention to the worst of black hat SEO tactics, and to attempt to shame the people who use them into changing their ways.

The group’s name, The Association of Search Engine Spammers (ASES) encourages marketers to clean up their act by opening a dialogue about common blachhat SEO practices like keyword stuffing, hidden text, and other shady tactics.

Wehbe originally set up the site, at AOSEP.com, to support another group: the Association of Search Engine Professionals. However, he said, that endeavor failed when would-be members couldn’t agree on a set of best practices, or even whether to recognize the basic guidelines of search engines like Yahoo!, Google and MSN. Frustrated with his peers’ unwillingness to eschew unethical optimization schemes, he decided to heap scorn on their activities.

Read the full story at ClickZ News.

AdSupervision is a service for stopping your pay per click campaigns if your web hosting server is detected unavailable. It works with Google Adwords, Yahoo/ Overture and 7Search.

If your website becomes unavailable for whatever reason, InternetSupervision will notify you via email, SMS, or voice contact and automatically pause the campaign(s) you have associated to the monitored service that failed. Once your website recovers, the system will notify you and reactivate the ad campaigns that were paused.

For a plan which monitors three services, checking your host for every 15 minutes, website content checking, unlimited email notifications, alternative city check false alarm prevention and 15 voice or SMS notifications and the AdSupervision service, is priced at $24.50 per month.

Customized plans are available. If you are currently advertising on pay per click advertising, particularly on popular keywords with high bidding price, then this service makes sense. You might want to assess the downtime of your web server before purchasing the service and decide the frequency of service checking required.

I am not an expert in math, but I pondered and calculated a scenario:

Assuming that AdSupervision checks every 15 minutes, but your web host stops working at the second minute, you’ll have 14 minutes of downtime unmonitored and still losing some money for the clicks.

The InternetSupervision claims that most server have uptime of just 99% (which is true), 1% of 86,400 seconds (number of seconds in a day) is equals to 864 seconds or 14:24 minutes. How are the chances that the service detect the unavailability on time?

In real world you might experience 20 days of uptime and another day 3 hours of downtime in which case this service might be of help. Just don’t expect this service will immediately detect and disable your ads if the host is down, if you are monitoring every so minutes. I may even miss the whole thing if you check every 15 minutes, using the scenario above.

Find out more about AdSupervision.