We have a lot of contributed content here on Search Engine Land. I would be among the first to yell at Google if I thought it was trying to tell us or anyone else that you couldn't have such content unless you blocked all the links. What makes us feel safe about Google is that, above all, we publish original content from contributors. It is not the same content that is simply dumped in multiple posts. Additionally, we have editors who often spend a lot of time working with writers and content to make sure it's newsworthy.
And we try to watch for links that we don't think are deserved or necessary in a story. We are not perfect. No publisher will. But I think from a publisher's perspective, the more you actually interact with the content you post to review and approve it, rather than blindly jewelry retouching service posting from a feed, the safer you'll be. If you haven't, consider using nofollow and canonical on previously published content, as Google recommended. As for those guest blogging requests I'll conclude with this part of today's article from Google: Webmasters generally prefer not to receive "
Post my article!" requests, and we encourage such cases to be reported to our spam report form. In effect. It's amazing how many requests we get like this every day, and I know we weren't alone. It's even more amazing when this type of guest blogging was supposed to be over. "Stick A Fork In It, Guest Blogging Is Done," said Matt Cutts in January 2014. Cutts, who is no longer with Google, was the head of its web spam team at the time. His statement was a shot heard on the web. Guest blogging has almost gone radioactive. No one seemed to want to touch it, let alone send silly mass emails asking for a message.