Report the spam, chances are that eventualy the links with get discounted, but we must do our part and reoprt the spam.

I find whitespark Local Citation Finder gives god results, it does not post for you, but does give a good list for given keyword and location

http://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/#

Good answer.

If i were a search engine, and some one searched for a blue widget, i could return a page that mentions a blue widget and has an image, that maybe of a blue widget. Or i could return your page that has a image marked up with HTML5, and microdata telling me that the image is in fact of a blue widget along with all the other details you can mark up with microdata and html5 telling me that the page has a lot of information about blue widgets, i know whitch one i would return to the user.

Lets say you had a domain xyz.com, and you had 3 peole tbhat had their own blogs
tom.xyz.com
dick.xyz.com
harry.xyz.com

wel then search engines may see this as non related sites

but if you had a site clothing.com

and had shirts.clothing.com
and shorts.clothing.com
and pants.clothing.com
then search engines proobably will see them as the same

to help to make sure you are seem as one in the same site, do planty of linking betwen sites, haveing all your images and stayle sheets in teh parent domain will also help search engines see that you are one large site.
try to make the links both ways,

i have done this on a few sites and i have had good results

You should not do the same, but report the spam to both google and bing.

Donford is correct in that is what matt cutts said, but i bet you if matts cutts main souce of income came from his web site he would change them.

You will lose a some link juice if you 301 redirect, i would look at the in-comming links, if the pages in question have little in links then i would change them. If you do, make sure you change all youyr internal links to point to the new format, dont allow internal links to go thought a redirect when you have controle of them.