(making the main content appear before the sidebars)

heh... google was insulted that you thought that he could not tell the content from the wrapper.

I could see paying to guest blog on the right site as being more effective than starting your own under certain circumstances.

If you have a "message to get out" then this is the fastest way to gain an audience.  You picked the correct words.... "on the right site".

And, the workers at that site will have to handle your content, place it on a page, link it into their internal navigation and then pay the bandwidth and storage fees.  There is no guarantee that they will get any return so they charge you up front.

Lots of my news posts were announcements of a much more detailed article that was posted on a "page" of my site.  Because my blog got eight to ten posts per day the post pages would be quickly buried deep in the blog.  The article pages were evergreen content.  So, I would redirect those posts to the article page.  I thought that it helped rankings.

I don't consider it blackhat because the newsy nature of the posts made them of "temporary value". We deleted and redirected thousands of post per year.

Up until about six months ago I had a blog that was focused on news content.  The blog got several posts per day of very fresh news.  New posts on that blog would be indexed within moments and land on the first page of google - sometimes in difficult SERPs.  The rankings would stick for a while - not more than 24 to 48 hours and then quickly slip down the SERPs and disappear.

My guess is that google recognized the "newsy" nature of that blog (lots of queries with "news" as the keyword) and would give that blog short-term good rankings for queries that were getting a surge in volume.  Again, that is a guess. But I saw the same treatment that you described.

This could be cause by "query deserves freshness".