Google Admits To Penalizing The BBC, But Only Granularly
This was big surprise to all – A shock news organization received a Google notification about poor things occurring to their website. If cannot believe the BBC from a link quality viewpoint, who can you believe? (Fox News folks, Take a Chill Pill)
So what occurred? After the deep search John Mueller found that this was a "granular" penalty. John said in the Google Webmaster Help thread:
Looking into the details here, what happened was that we found unnatural links to an individual article, and took a granular action based on that. This is not negatively affecting the rest of your website on a whole.
In this BBC one page there is a unnatural links. Because of that, Google took action on that one single post. Google didn’t penalize entire website.
Google didn’t tell which page there is a unnatural links. So there is a manual penalty on a particular post page and BBC representative has no hint which page it is. I think Google tell them which article had unnatural link so they can solve it somehow.
By the way, this is an amazing case of Google penalizing the biggest fresh organization in the glove but only one particular page.