If your site has been penalized by Penguin or Panda, or if you have received a manual penalty, your first instinct is probably to try and help the site recover in rankings (provided that you weren’t already expecting this and gave up on the site in advance). Even if your site was penalized for having a multitude of harmful links pointing to it, recovering it may still be an option, but it may also be a resource and time sink that will ultimately result in failure. Knowing whether it is feasible to attempt recovery can be quite difficult, especially since people can get emotionally attached to their sites, but giving up on it can sometimes be the only reasonable option that you have left.
Obviously determined to preserve in their efforts to fight black-hat SEO and webspam only with black and white animals that are just cute and cuddly enough to not make the public’s opinion on the algorithms that they are mascots of even worse than it is, on the 24th of April in 2012, Google activated their new algorithm that was later to be officially named Penguin. As was the case with Panda, Google didn’t give the algorithm a name until it became possible that the public might come with a, not too flattering, name on their own. People were already starting to call the algorithm “Titanic”, when Google decided that they actually might be if they did their own branding, and made the name Penguin official.