Wilburforce - 10:21 am on Oct 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

Has anyone tried to add new links to a penalized site instead of removing old ones?

Not manually, but my penalised pages have gained links organically since Penguin 1 (which has had no apparent effect).

I wouldn't expect new backlinks to undo the damage if Google has penalised a page for an unnatural link pattern. My penalised pages have backlinks from a few sites that have each provided - unsolicited - hundreds of links with identical anchor text pointing to the same page, which looks unnatural whichever way you view it.

As I can't disavow them in WMT (unlike Bing) or remove them, Penguin makes me vulnerable to off-site events I can't control, which as well as being inherently unfair has questionable validity in assessing quality or relevance.

Looking at the latest Google SERPS, one might suspect that a Microsoft mole had infiltrated Google's algorithm team.