Google reminded site owners about using the perils of link building via articles, such as guest blogging.  But one part of their blog post seems to have passed unnoticed – the request Google made that site owners file spam reports for any “Post my article” requests they receive.

Many sites engage in large scale “post my blog article” requests, and the majority of them are automated and are completely off-topic don’t match the intended audience of the site the request is sent to. For example, a recipe blog might get requests from a loan site or an MP3 download site.  And because they are automated, many site owners get bombarded with these requests.

In their blog post, Google warns that this type of outreach not only annoys site owners but is against their guidelines.  And if you receive one of these requests?  Report them.

Also, webmasters generally prefer not to receive aggressive or repeated “Post my article!” requests, and we encourage such cases to be reported to our spam report form.

There is always the possibility that this could be abused and someone can report a competitor without ever receiving one of these article requests.  However, Google would still have to investigate the links and would only take action if the site owner really is engaging in nefarious link building techniques.  But reporting a site for this would not be enough on its own to trigger a manual action.

If you receive one of these “post my article” requests, you can file a spam report with Google here.  There isn’t a specific report type for this, but the “Paid links” spam report would be the closest.