Google's 950 Penalty

[Halfdeck]

For example, suppose that in April you had a bunch of links at the bottom of your page that looked like "Online Loan | Santa Cruz Hotels | Xbox Mod Chip | Home Loan | Mobile Phones " or "Bad Credit Mortgages | Afvallen | Problem Remortgage | Mortgage | Myspace Layouts". Linking to bad neighborhoods or spammy sites can affect your site's reputation. So the webmaster help group might look at your site and say "Hey, why not remove that link co-op stuff and then do a reinclusion request that says 'In case this was a factor, I'm no longer participating in this co-op link exchange and linking sites like this from my root page.' That might do it."

If you're penalized, I think you really have no choice but to submit a reinclusion request. Even if your site is clean, once your site is penalized, according to this quote, the penalty will not go away automatically. Someone inside Google has to flick a switch.