Very interesting to see Matt Cutts (top pr guy at Google) commenting on this gentleman's blog about link trading, and then the guy mentioning that his google rankings "improved drastically" after this.
http://www.brent-wilson.com/archives/3/#comment-40
"I just want to follow up that my Google rankings have drastically improved today. Thank you Matt Cutts for responding and helping me with this."
My first thought when I read this was 'could it be a hoax'?... but anyways... his whole blog post really hits home for those of us that have been in google hell on a site where we get 20 times the traffic from other sources than google
is there any doubt that manual tweakings are playing a bigger role than the algorithm itself nowadays? the algorithm penalizes all over the place, if you are lucky to get a manual un-penalize maybe that helps alot?