I absolutely love when the industry is transparent and Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO said his site was slapped by an unnatural links manual action by Google and the result was that his site no longer ranks for its name or key terms. A lot of folks in the industry have been saying Google has toned down these manual actions, espesially around links but here is one example of one....
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Google Still Penalizing Sites For Unnatural Links & It Can Hurt Bad
seroundtable.com