This week has been 'links week' on the Google Webmaster Blog, with a series of posts about Google's view of web links and which work best to support the indexing and ranking of websites. Each post gives a very basic overview of the advantages of links, with some links to additional resources or posts.

After the initial introduction post on Monday, Day 2 considered the importance of link architecture within a website and how this can help the usability of the site (allowing users to find their way around and know where they are on the site at any time) as well as the 'crawlability' of the site, which enables search engines to find all pages easily. it also covers the advantages of using descriptive anchor text for the links.

The third article covers the importance of outbound links on a website and how these can - or can't - help a website's credibility in Google's view. As with the previous day, the blog post includes a number of 'typical' questions about the subject at the end.

The final post for the week looks at perhaps the most important issue, at least from a search ranking perspective, of inbound links into a website. It explains what these links tell Google about a website and suggests a number of ways that websites can increase the number of these links, such as through blogs, articles and helpful content.

It's certainly not been the definitive guide to linking, but Google's view of these things is always worth paying attention to!