This might be relevant to some of the linklist problems

[Useless]

Well, I think there is, at the very least, a marketing lesson in your opening post, and apparently some insight on the mindset of Google's human reviewers. We do tend to toss a dozen handfuls of different colored shit against the walls of every page on a link list. Tighter targeting could probably serve us all well.

[Halfdeck]

Occams razor says the most likely cause of the banning was the adsense review.

I doubt that. Google is shutting down adsense accounts so they don't need to go to the trouble of banning a site just because its an MFA.

Not to mention the site isn't banned.

low quality content can pretty much only be decided by a human.

I think you're underestimating Google a bit.

For example, a list of possible quality factors when ranking blogs in Google's Blogsearch:

• Popularity based on news aggregator subscriptions.

  A blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document. Also, subscriptions can be validated against “subscriptions spam” (where spammers subscribe to their own blog documents in an attempt to make them “more popular”) by validating unique users who subscribed, or by filtering unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the subscribers.

• Inclusion of the blog in blogrolls:

  "A blogroll link to a blog document is an indication of popularity of that blog document, so aggregated blogroll links to a blog document can be counted and used to infer magnitude of popularity for the blog document."

• Existence of the blog in high quality blogrolls
• References to the blog document by other sources
• Pagerank of the blog

  A high pagerank (a signal usually calculated for regular web pages) is an indicator of high quality and, thus, can be applied to blog documents as a positive indication of the quality of the blog documents.

Negative indicators:

• Frequency of new posts

  Feeds typically include only the most recent posts from a blog document. Spammers often generate new posts in spurts (i.e., many new posts appear within a short time period) or at predictable intervals (one post every 10 minutes, or a post every 3 hours at 32 minutes past the hour). Both behaviors are correlated with malicious intent and can be used to identify possible spammers. Therefore, if the frequency at which new posts are added to the blog document matches a predictable pattern, this may be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

• The content of posts

  Spammers may put one version of content into a feed to improve their ranking in search results, while putting a different version on their blog document (e.g., links to irrelevant ads). This mismatch (between feed and blog document) can, therefore, be a negative indication of the quality of the blog document.

• Size of blog posts

  Many automated post generators create numerous posts of identical or very similar length. As a result, the distribution of post sizes can be used as a reliable measure of spamminess.

Just to drive the point home, here's a list of quality score factors for Google Ads:

The patent applications lists examples of 44 different factors that might be used in a quality score that doesn’t focus upon click through rates. These include such things as:
# How many times a user selects a given ad in a given session.
# A duration of time, from an ad result selection, until the user issues another search query. This may include time spent on other pages (reached via a search result click or ad click) subsequent to a given ad click.
# A ratio of the time, from a given ad result selection until the user issues another search query, as compared to all other times from ad result selections until the user issued another search query.
# Time spent, given an ad result selection, on viewing other results for the search query, but not on the given ad result.
# How many searches (i.e., a unique issued search query) that occur in a given session prior to a given search result or ad selection;
# How many searches that occur in a given session after a given search result or ad selection.
# Rather than searches, how many result page views that occur for a given search query before a given selection. This can be computed within the query (i.e., just for a unique query), or for the entire session;
# Rather than searches, how many search result page views that occur for a given search query after this selection. This can be computed within the query (i.e., just for the unique query), or for the entire session;

That's just the tip of the iceberg (yeah, just because there's a patent out on something doesn't mean Google is using it, but every patent reveals how the kids over at the Googleplex think)

Google can judge content quality without humans (though Google is far from perfect and of course they do have thousands of people looking over the SERPs).

[Bill]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

Not to mention the site isn't banned.

Both the link that I followed to that thread, and, as I recall, the thread itself, used the word banned, so I used it as well.

My memory of what the thread said may be flawed, it's been several days now since I read it.

I don't ordinarily check to see wether a site is actually banned, that's not the part that interests me, and as you know, people use the word banned when they may have merely dropped in the results.