Unnatural outbound links

Last week we got a webmaster email telling us that Google thinks we have been selling links on three our blog posts. This was a surprise as we had not participated in any link selling activity on these blogs but had participated in accepting blog posts from MyBlogGuest.com. We also noticed our page rank has disappeared back in December PR update.

Actions to remove links

We could not go through three years of blog posts to remove links that we suspected were in contravention of Google guidelines nor could we nofollow each one individually. Since the blogs were in wordpress our result was to use a plugin to unfollow all external links.

WMT reconsideration request

Following the implementation of the unfollow plugin we replied to Google through webmaster forum to say what we did to address their concerns via reconsideration request. We now wait to
hopefully get a positive feedback from big G.

Update: We see from this post on search engine land has recently been hit under the Google blog network clampdown. This is a surprise since we were given to understand that guest blogging activity was an accepted practice.