Actually,
Google says "Webspam" refers to pages that try to trick Google into ranking them highly.
Here's a page with how various other search engines
define spam.
You might like to follow that up with a dose of what eConsultancy has to say about
guest blogging, a common way of getting links, rankings, traffic, whatever your intention may be.
This topic has been beat to death many times here, with issues of paid links, nofollow vs dofollow, etc, coming into question. Here's the official Google guidance on '
bad linking', where they make it clear you are okay to build links as long as you aren't building:
- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
Guest blogging CAN fall into their recommendation that, "The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. "
The same is true of reviews, editorials, commentary, case studies, white papers, press releases and similar linkbuilding.