Over the past few days, the SEO industry has been talking about how a site received a manual search action from Google for unnatural links for a “legitimate guest blog” post. But when you look, this manual action only affected “some pages”, not the whole site.
Niche Site Lady Posted on X, “Google hit me with a manual action for ‘unnatural links’. I’ve never bought a link. The example they gave was a legitimate guest post from years ago (I’ve only done about 5 ).” He shared this screenshot of this manual action:
I thought it was interesting that someone got a manual action for the links, because I rarely see people posting these manual actions on social media.
But most people found it interesting that a “legitimate guest blog post” involved this manual action. Truth be told, he said he’s only done like five in the history of his site. You would think that five would not result in manual action.
Anyway, Marie Haynes, who did a lot of manual stock recovery projects back in the day, elaborated on this:
I haven’t reviewed this manual action case, but it’s really interesting to me.
Here’s why.
NSL got manual action for unnatural links. She says she has no paid links, just a small handful of guest posts.
Between 2013 and 2017 or so, all I did was remove manual actions. hundreds… https://t.co/DLRxaXWxyL
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) February 3, 2024
She wrote, and I will quote:
I haven’t reviewed this manual action case, but it’s really interesting to me.
Here’s why.
NSL got manual action for unnatural links. She says she has no paid links, just a small handful of guest posts.
Between 2013 and 2017 or so, all I did was remove manual actions. Hundreds of them.
At one point I recruited 20 of my friends and we all sat in my dining room manually auditing the links one by one non-stop. Our goal was to rank them so we could strategize and decide what Google wanted to remove.
Back in 2013, the links that caused manual action were the kind that Google ignores today… Keyword anchored links in directories like “BestLinkDirectory” and electronic article type sites. Remember ArticlesBase?
Then eventually we didn’t see any more manual actions with links like this because Google’s systems figured out how to neutralize them.
Next we saw a wave of sites penalized probably due to widget links. Like, here’s a tool that you can embed, and by the way, it links to our site.
Again, you don’t see people building widget links like we did a decade ago because the algorithms figured out how to stop ranking them.
In 2020, most of the sites we helped had article links that looked completely natural at first glance. When you looked at the patterns, it became clear that there was a pattern of inserting links into articles to manipulate the rankings.
Over the last few years I have seen very little talk of manual actions. Google still gave them and sometimes people would contact me, but it wasn’t like before.
This week I heard about some cases of new manual actions. If this is really for the guest post links (doesn’t matter if they were paid, they were done to manipulate the rankings) then my bet is that we will soon see declines in the rankings of many sites that have thrived on guest posts . link as Google’s systems get even better at learning which links actually represent recommendations.
Every time I write something about guest post links, there are tons of questions. If you google my name plus “guest post links”, I’ve written a lot about this over the years.
The arguments are usually: – They are not unnatural if they are not paid. Honestly, would you have made those links if it wasn’t for the SEO value?
-I could target links to my competitor and penalize them. The thing is, it’s not the links themselves that penalize sites. These are the patterns that are consistent with link building to manipulate rankings. Google has many years of experience in identifying link manipulation patterns.
– So isn’t all link building unnatural? It’s not uncommon to tell people about your site and invite them to link. In fact, Google recommends it. Where it becomes a problem is when the motivation to link back is more for SEO purposes than because you actually think your audience would find it useful.
This caught the attention of Google’s John Mueller who responded LinkedIn saying, “It’s been a decade,” and linked to former Google search spam man Matt Cutts, post called The Decline and Fall of SEO Guest Blogging. John added: “The funny thing is that a lot of what Matt said a decade ago still applies today when it comes to Google Search, don’t you agree?”
Basically, John is saying that this was part of some kind of guest blogging network, which is not what the blogger was saying. I mean, that’s what Cutts talked about in this blog post, how Google penalized these guest blogging networks. Back in 2014, Cutts also said that guest blogging was dead, put a fork in it.
In any case, have you seen legitimate content affected by manual actions from Google?
Discussion in the forum a X i LinkedIn.
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