My site has had a manual action performed on it by Google indicating that I have inbound links that fall outside of their quality guidelines. I did my own research, found what I thought was the issue, had the links removed and requested reconsideration. Google's response surprised me in that they highlighted two specific pages with links that were the direct result of valid press releases and a publisher picking up our release off a wire service. Has anyone else seen this occur? Anyone had a case successfully reconsidered? I realize that I don't need to do anything at all as the manual action is in effect and will stay that way, discounting those links, but I would rather a) not have any manual action against my site and b) know for the future so this doesn't happen again. Also, is this applicable for guest blog posts, which effectively create the same type of backlinks? Thanks

It is not directly sorted by popularity, no. I have run several cases in recent history against their associated search volumes and they really vary. I believe a keyword does have to have at least a credible amount of monthly search volume to be listed there at all, but Google appears to be truly predictive, perhaps based on recent search history, Google+ data, trending topics, etc.