Can I Recover From a Penalty?

I don't want to give up my domain

[epg55]

Hi all
Going to be v.honest. Just sent to Google prison and probably rightly so(grey bars). Spent 3 years making 2 sites - both well ranked with no seo but I became covinced Google were not catching keyword crazy sites and decided to try seo myself with keywords - all directly related/ clearly visible - but lots!

2nd - as a favour I placed some pages in my sites linked to 2 friends sites - no reason except to get them indexed with relevant kwords - can I hear laughter?!
3rd Finally I managed to cut/paste a 'link within a link' on nearly every page of 1 of my sites to my other site that I found by chance with a link checker. Ive been through google dos/donts and cant find anything else other than 1 site uses frames (I like them cos they load quick). Never used wpg.

I no longer wish to do seo as I've learned here that Google does try to be fair and if in the end I concentrate on a better site then it's done it's job. I dont really know what im doing anyway - bull in a keyword factory. My sites are nice contain loads of info, great free service etc so I'd rather sraighten them out than get new domains/IPs - make things worse. I am halfway through the cleanup. My question is - is there any point? no sarcasm please:)

[korkus2000]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld epg55 [webmasterworld.com],
Yes sites have been known to have penalties lifted. You should clean it up and then email google about the status of your site. You should also try and get new incomming links.

Another option is to toss your domains and start again. Get new links and get existing ones changed. This will be a slow process but you can recover.

[rjohara]

I don't have experience with penalized sites (there are many threads on WebmasterWorld on the subject), but I did cause my own site to be deleted once by making an error in the robots.txt file. Poof, all gone from Google. Fixed robots.txt and it was picked up again in a couple of months. Perhaps this is a solution for people trying to clean up sites: specifically exclude spiders with robots.txt while you work on your revisions, wait until the pages vanish (a month or two), and then put an open robots.txt file back.

[rfgdxm1]

I'd say grovel and beg to Google. If after a couple weeks they don't respond, throw the domain names away and start from scratch again.