[Halfdeck]

Several months ago, I left a comment on Matt Cutts blog with a note: "do not publish this comment." A few weeks later, I got an email from Google's spam team letting me know they read my comment and will look into it. Adam Lasnik also followed up with additional communication. At the end of the day, they didn't confirm or deny if a site in question was under a penalty - but since IMO Adam tends to be open about lack of penalties, I took the lack of confirmation in that case as evidence that there's a problem. The site in question hasn't yet recovered. The problem with this site in particular IMO had to do with linking practices Google doesn't like (nothing wrong with on-page content as far as I could tell).