Is Google Going After Guest Posts or Paid Guest Posts?

One question is if Google is issuing manual actions for guest post articles, for guest post articles that are paid or guest post articles that are over-optimized.

The warning email received from Google states that this manual action is specifically about paid guest articles.

The publisher reported that his site does not mention that they accept guest posts.

He also said that the outbound links only used branded anchor text, not keyword-optimized anchor text.

Over the past four months his site only posted 15 guest posts over the past quarter (an average of one guest post per week).