Originally Posted by beaner

I'm going to give you my 2 cents about this issue.

First, the reason I know this is I spent about 6 months trying to get off a penalty. This was not a manual penalty, it was a flagged penalty by their algo. In those 6 months I visited the google forum all the time and read story, after story, and then answer, after answer.

The underlying answer was, your site goes against google terms for *blah* reason. Remove *blah* then submit for reconsideration. Keep in mind many of the responses came direct from google employees. They said to acknowledge what you did was against google terms, let them know it has been removed/fixed, and kindly ask them to reconsider the indexing of the site and that it will never happen again. Again, and again, and again...

Now here is the kicker... your site is a manual penalty. Somebody from google actually had to sandbox your site. In my opinion, the reason being, they cannot put anything like that into their algorithm as it would kill almost every site with ads on them, including their bro sites. *Like that* meaning they want to clean up the results pages from redundant material.

Every reconsider request is read by somebody eventually, I have a suspicion it will just fall on deaf ears.

If anyone has gotten out of this penalty, please post. I suspect nobody will unfortunately.