Google's Matt Cutts has posted a request on his blog asking for web users to submit link spam reports on websites that appear to be using 'spammy links'. The option to submit information about spam sites has been available for some years, but it appears that Google is now making a special effort to catch up, or get ahead, of the type of link spam techniques being used (such as paid links that pass PageRank, blog spammers, guestbook spammers), and so they want to combine manual reports with the new algorithms he says they are developing.

This request is likely to generate lots of submissions from website marketers that want to try to penalise websites that might be ranking ahead of them, although hopefully Google will mostly receive genuine submissions from users who know what they are looking for and will contribute to a 'clean up' of the search results!

Advertising Age covers the story of a recent report published by Forrester Research that promotes the use of paid blogs, but has attracted the anger of Google who strongly discount this activity in terms of link benefit. According to Google's webmaster guidelines, paid blogs are akin to paid links and are not encouraged - in fact, Google wants such blogs to be disclosed as such and any outbound links should also carry the "no follow" tags that are now widely used by many Web 2.0 sites to discourage 'link spam'.

Following the release of the Forrester report, Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web-spam team, reiterated on his blog in no uncertain terms that those who fail to comply with Google's rules will face punishment, though he didn't state how the offenders would be punished. From Forrester's perspective, the author of the report said he would follow up with a blog post that deals with Google's demands, including spelling out the need to include "no follow" tags in paid blog entries.

There is of course some debate about how big companies are now using blogs and paying writers to post positive articles about their products or brands. The concern for Google is that this is another way to develop website links and also that the use of paid blog entries should be revealed. The argument is likley to continue for some time.

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!