[nikatwork]

You are correct that manual penalties can be applied, I worded my previous comment badly. What I mean is they don't appear to "manually" tamper with the result weightings eg by using a whitelist of upweighted domains.

While they can slap a manual -50 penalty on your domain, from memory you are notified of such penalties in Google Analytics so it's not a silent and nefarious manipulation. MeFi should know if they have such a penalty. I also admit that the "get out of jail" process is even more annoying than dealing with an Apple app store rejection.

[mattmanser]

Webmaster tools, not analytics, and it's buried in a sub menu and has the most confusing text and only gives one example link.