The weekend of April 8, 2016, Google issued manual actions for “unnatural outbound links*”.  A penalty issued by Google’s manual action team that specifically oversees linking out to other sites with the intent of manipulating Google search results.  It seems as though Google has penalized the sites by not trusting any of the links on the website.

The email sent to webmasters read:

If you see this message on the Manual Actions page, it means that Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative outbound links. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

 

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to the affected portions of your site. Actions that affect your whole site are listed under Site-wide matches. Actions that affect only part of your site and/or some incoming links to your site are listed under Partial matches.

It is recommended to log into your Google Search Console account and check your all messages box for a notification.  If you were affected by the outbound link penalties, you can learn how to fix them here.

*Deceptive, or manipulative outbound links.