[personZ]

Obviously, what happened to metafilter isn't right.

Why is that obvious?

One aspect of these types of stories that seems to get ignored is the value that these sites provide for searchers: Was Metafilter providing a good experience for users? Is their experience worse with the site ranked lower? Is it, perhaps, better?

That is the question that needs to be answered (e.g. what questions brought someone to metafilter? I can honestly say I've never been directed there), not whether MetaFilter is entitled to some set quantity of search traffic per month.

[Consultant32452]

If Google et. al. can manually punish you, they should be able to manually un-punish you also. That this feature doesn't exist is a serious design flaw. A human being should always be able to look at a site and say, "Nope, you're good." and let you be ranked naturally again.

[jshen]

How would they decide which sites to manually look at? Surely they can't look at all of them.

[Consultant32452]

Presumably by a mechanism similar to how they would decide which sites to manually look at when doing manual punishments.

[arg01]

But the successful bad actors are more noticeable because they are near the top of the search while those you have to unpunish are hard to find.

Even if they can easily find them I think the real reason they want to stay away from it is that having such a tool would open a can of worms on the search neutrality side of things. (i.e. we know Google+ is a good actor we should remove link out penalties, we know are largest advertising client is generally a good actor, we should remove penalties from their site). Even if google wasn't tempted to misuse the tool you can easily see it generating a bunch of lawsuits form bad or unlucky actors accusing google of favoritism.