"In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would."
How can a site know if they've been demoted, manually or algorithmically? How can they find out why they've been demoted in order to clean up?
If you have the site registered in Google Webmaster Tools, you get a message within the GWT system about the penalty, and an area where you can appeal it. You also get warned about malware infections, and I think now old installs of Wordpress.
I had a client get caught in one a while ago, the notification isn't perfect and at the time (I don't know about now) they didn't e-mail the account holder as well, which I thought was a bit daft as they have your e-mail as it's your login.
For the client, when I cleaned up their site and wrote an appeal saying what had been done, the Webspam team were very quick at processing our appeal and restoring the site. It wasn't a buying links penalty though, it was about stuff they had on the site from some dodgy advice they'd had a few years before that I'd been trying to get them to remove, so it was easy to show they'd learnt their lesson in the appeal.
How can a site know if they've been demoted, manually or algorithmically? How can they find out why they've been demoted in order to clean up?