Google Manual Penalty - Unnatural Links FROM My Site - Where?

[AaronGro]

Hi Mozzers,

I've just received a manual penalty for one of my websites. The penalty is for 'unnatural links from my site which I find disturbing because I can't see that anything really wrong with it.

The website is www.lighting-tips.co.uk - its a pretty new blog (only 6-7 posts) and whilst I've allowed guest posting I'm being very careful that the content is relevant and good quality. I'm only allowing 1 - 2 links and very few with proper anchor text so I'm wondering what has been done so wrong that I'm getting this manual penalty? Am I missing something here?

Thanks in advance.

Aaron

[MarieHaynes]

Those guest blogs were mostly created for the purpose of improving another site's PageRank and manipulating the search results. Even if they're not paid links they are links that were made with the intention of gaming Google.  If you remove the links or nofollow them and then file for reconsideration you'll get your penalty removed.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Aaron,

Yup - MBG will be your downfall here. You will need to remove those posts to be considered for re-inclusion and the penalty lifted. Google has only just taken this action in the last day or two, so watch our for more analysis and blog posts / commentary on the fall-out and recovery. It has affected a huge collection of sites, including some that used MBG years ago and only for two or three posts.

Cheers,

Jane

[AaronGro]

Thanks Philip - As it happens it was part of myblogguest.com. I had no idea Google took it down. Looks like they really have it in for them.

The website has basically only guest blogs - I thought it'll be okay as long as the content was good and useful to real people and not too many links but obviously that's not the case.

So back to the drawing board.

Aaron

[Philip-DiPatrizio]

Curious... was your site apart of the MyBlogGuest.com network?  They were recently taken down hard by Google.

Here's a recent Tweet from Matt Cutts stating that sites posting guest posts can receive manual penalties, not just sites that receive links from guest posts: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/446438659689316353

Your site does seem like pretty good quality, but the sole purpose of it appears to be for guest blogging opportunities.  Someone manually reviewed it and decided it was penalty worthy... To be reconsidered you might need to either A) remove all the links or B) nofollow all the links.  I'm not 100% sure if nofollowing is enough.  You'll probably also want to start posting a lot more content that isn't guest blogs.  You might be already doing that (I didn't look around for too long).  Good luck, Aaron.