Has google abandoned manual penalties?

[superclown2]

Some time ago new sites with thousands of spammy links would rise up the SERPs until they got too near the top of page 1. There would then be a manual inspection from a Google IP address and the site would disappear into oblivion.

I am now seeing many similar sites occupying top spots for valuable finance terms here in the UK - and they have been there for months. Has Google's cost-cutting exercise chopped the manual reviewers? Or has Matt Cutts' absence severely degraded their anti-spam campaign?

[aristotle]

If the algorithm could do a proper job, it would identify any obviously-spammy sites itself and never allow them to reach the top of the search results in the first place. This would eliminate any need for manual reviews in these cases.

In borderline cases, where the algorithm can't decide if a site deserves high rankings or not, then it could set a "flag" to alert the manual spam team that a review is needed.

Another type of case that should get a manual review is a site that is rapidly gaining traffic from Google and soon exceeds some threshold, such as 10,000 visitors per day. This should trigger an automatic manual review.

In general, the need for manual reviews partly depends on how good a job the algorithm is doing.

[FranticFish]

It must be generally pretty bad, otherwise churn'n'burn would be a deprecated business model.

[Walt Hartwell]

I had a site with a manual penalty several months ago, so manual penalties existed at that time. It took a couple of tries to get the penalty lifted, but the site is doing fine now.

[Shaddows]

Manual penalties do not scale. Google is all about scalability.

Where they can automate, they do.

They will automate as soon as it is "good enough" rather then perfect. "Good Enough" very much depends on your perspective.