clipped from: searchengineland.com
It is no secret that human review has been playing a bigger role at Google over the past couple years. And we are emotional beings... no matter how logical the guidelines may be, emotions cause human errors. But not all sites that get penalized are penalized in error. Many deserve it.
Sadly, Google's guidelines for its "remote quality raters," people who are paid by Google to help with quality control, are clearer than the public guidelines for webmasters. Why? Google is using these remote quality raters as an effective and efficient piece of the relevancy algorithm.
I have read and re-read leaked Google guidelines for remote quality raters from 2003, 2005, and 2007. The general intent was similar in all 3 document sets, but the specifics changed as the web changed. One of the most revealing quotes from the 2007 document was about music lyrics sites: