I am seeing a trend in digital publishing on sites like HuffPo and others where they are increasing the length of article headlines to 3-4 rows of large type, often containing multiple sentences. Other publishers like CNN.com still have shorter headlines and character counts. Perhaps this is just a design aesthetic, but I am curious if there is any SEO value to having longer headlines assuming you are able to fit your targeted keywords/terms and message in something shorter?

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.

It was a mix of both. There were some embedded keywords with nofollow links (which I thought were ok given that they were nofollowed). The keywords weren't forced in, just naturally present and then linked, doing so to have a nice balance between follow and nofollow links to the site.

Upon further investigation, I traced back all inbound links created from PRWeb activities and found that most links created were correctly tagged as "nofollow" but it appears certain publishers removed the embedded nofollow tag when publishing. Specifically, pressreleasepoint.com and streetinsider.com are two examples where the same press release that was sent to and published by hundreds of other outlets as nofollow, were published by them with no such tag.

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