tedster - 8:41 pm on Sep 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

There are definitely cases of manual penalties being removed, but it usually takes a complete address of the problem and a reconsideration request.

There may even be a periodic review of manual penalty flags without a reconsideration request. I know of a couple cases where the old -30 penalty was removed with no request being made - and I'm talking here about the penalty that put your site a #31 for a search on example.com.