Google Sends Manual Penalties for Guest Post Articles

Google may be cracking down on sites that publish guest posts. There are several reports of unnatural outbound link penalties. The publisher reported that the manual action email said:

We have detected that some of your articles are guest posts… We have disabled your authority for your outbound links. Please set your outbound links to nofollow and submit a review request.

The warning email received from Google states that this manual action is specifically about paid guest articles.

What’s interesting is that in Google’s example of a problem page, Google accurately identified the one guest post out of a total of five outbound links in the article. That meant that Google was able to exactly spot which of the links was benefited the person making the guest post. It appears that this is part of Google’s fight against paid links in general and hammering paid links in guest posts in particular.

As of this writing there is no official word from Google.