A Google Penalty Removal Leads To Less Google Traffic?

A WebmasterWorld thread has an interesting case I've never seen before.

A webmaster, who is a "senior member" at WebmasterWorld, claims he received a notification that Google revoked a manual penalty they had on his site for a while. Three days after the penalty revocation the traffic from Google "completely" stopped coming in.

It is like he was better off with the manual penalty versus not having the penalty at all.

We know Google does manually revoke partial penalties but this doesn't seem like a partial revocation.

One theory given in the thread is that now the manual penalty was revoked, an automated algorithmic penalty kicked in and made things worse. I am not sure I believe that 100%. I don't think it works that way, but who knows - I don't have that type of knowledge. It just doesn't seem right based on the knowledge I do have.

Netmeg explained his theory in the thread:

Is it possible that once the manual action was revoked, one of the algorithmic changes finally kicked in?

Or maybe it is just a temporary glitch and things will fix itself in a few more days?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.