Does Google Ever Wholly “Forgive” the Penalized Websites?

Only few things can scare a website owner more than the possibility of being imposed a penalty from Google. The source of that fear is vagueness. No one is entirely sure about what can arouse the anger of the search engine giant. Over the years Google has been issuing out all kinds of penalties. There are a big variety of reasons that can cause your website to get penalized by Google, ranging from building too many spam links to posting duplicate content or false material. 

Well, if a penalty is indeed imposed, the website can always solve their problems by promising Google that they will never go down the same route again, and then filing a reconsideration request, asking Google to reindex the website after its review or get their PageRank back.

For instance, let’s assume you’ve been imposed with a link penalty, and you withdraw all those bad links. Is Google eve going to rank you as well as you once ranked?

Netmeg, a senior member at Webmasterworld posted the following message in a thread discussing if Google will ever fully "forgive" a site after it has been penalized:

“...one of my clients was completely banned from Google for a spammy link exchange program; we cleaned 'em all up and filed a reinclusion request, and they are currently #1-3 for just about every relevant search phrase you could think of. They're ranking higher now than they ever did before the penalty - but it did take about a year to work their way up to that point.” 

Ok, so Google may forgive, but do they forget? Hardly so. Google actually keeps historical record of website penalties. And this is very important data for Google to have when manually checking a reconsideration request. Also, according to some reports, lying in a reconsideration request may result in the smashing of your website, for good. However, there are still no published records of the amount of reconsideration requests allowed and how they can influence your future rankings.