I appreciated reading your thoughts, and it made me feel better because the worst part of it all was feeling like nobody could hear my protests that they made a mistake.

I made 8 reconsideration requests, which are messages you send Google to ask for a human to manually review the penalty. All of them were denied with the same automated response.

It did not feel like any humans actually read or thought about the situation, so I felt voiceless.

As usual, if you make a public scene, a large corporation will often notice, and look closer at that individual's issue. I think that's what happened in this case.

I happened to notice today that whocalled.us was back in Google, and the "Pure Spam" manual action had disappeared. There was no notice or explanation, and it feels like someone at Google saw my post, and quietly fixed it.

I thought it was important to notify HN about this.

I don't know how to feel about this. I already removed AdSense from the site, and gave up on it. From a shortsighted view, I should be happy, and thank Google.

But this experience showed me that Google has more power over my website than I do.