You may want to read these posts:
Especially considering the definitely-not-a-sock-puppet post by jimboykin [1], an account that was created immediately after this thread and has but a single post on HN.
Like isn't it kind of insane that the top Google search engineer provided customer service to OP, but he couldn't get a response thru a normal channel.
When I refer to Matt Cutts lying, I mostly mean his comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426209
I have no idea what that business is with that company.
I did everything in his comment to address the claimed automated penalties: removed every single ad and every single citation from the site. No changes in ranking at all, after months. I forget how many. 6 months?
That’s because Matt Cutts was lying: there was a manual penalty in place at that time.