Over the past few days the SEO industry has been chattering it up about how a site received a Google Search manual action for unnatural links for a “legit 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 never bought a link. The example they gave was a legit guest post from years ago (I’ve only ever done about 5 of these).” She shared this screenshot of this manual action:
I found it interesting that someone received a manual action for links, because I rarely see people posting about these manual actions anymore on social.
But most people found it interesting that a “legit guest blog post” resulted in this manual action. Truth is, she did say she only did like five of these in the history of her site. You’d think five would not result in a manual action.
In any event, Marie Haynes, who did a ton of manual action recovery projects back in the day, dug into this:
She wrote, and I’ll quote:
This caught the eye of Google’s John Mueller who responded on LinkedIn saying, “It’s been a decade,” and linked to Matt Cutts, former Google search spam man, post named The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO. John added, “the funny thing is that alot of what Matt has said a decade ago still applies today when it comes to Google Search, would you agree with that?”
Basically, John is saying this was part of some sort of guest blog network, which is not what the blogger was saying about. I mean, that is what Cutts spoke about in that blog post, how Google penalzied these guest blog networks. In 2014, Cutts also said guest blogging is dead, stick a fork in it.
In any event, have you seen legit content get hit by manual actions from Google?
