Google’s Head of Spam gave quite an insightful explanation of how Google penalizes websites in its SERPs.
Time Outs
We all know that there are penalties that are handed out by Google and we’ve always believed they were time based, however it was interesting to hear Google’s Head of Spam to refer to them as Time Outs. This use of language suggests to me that Google is not so anti-SEO/marketing as they would have you believe, that they understand that people want to try things that will get them to the top of the rankings on occasions and that it’s likely that sometimes SEOs and webmasters will get things wrong, or maybe just try a bit too hard.
Automated vs. Manual Penalties
Google seems to be becoming a bit more transparent about the manual element of of its webspam process and made reference to only the manual elements are reconsidered when reconsideration requests are submitted, however as Cutts stated, the manual spam process feeds back into the automated spam process, which would suggest fewer and fewer things area being considered through Google’s request reconsideration, this should be a warning (if there really needs to be one) that SEOs should be whiter than white.
Check out what Cutts actually said below: