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:
I haven’t reviewed this manual action case but it is really interesting to me.
Here’s why.
NSL got a manual action for unnatural links. She says she has no paid links, just a small handful of guest posts.