Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

I doubt it works this way. People at Google use search too, and they don't like what they see.

Part of the problem is that they're fighting against financial incentives that they themselves created. There's plenty of upside and little downside to abusing it, so it's just endless whack-a-mole.

Another issue is just how bureaucratic the process has become. They want it to look good to the regulators and the courts, so they put up with a pattern of abuse for five years, then announce some well-reasoned but narrow policy change (e.g. "product reviews now need to be actual hands-on reviews"), and... a month later, spammers are just adding an extra lie on all the fake review websites.