I did some work for a client some months ago to remove links to her site placed by an SEO company which led to a Google penalty.
Google responded saying that while we had removed a number of links they wanted to see more removed before taking away the penalty. We have since removed some more, but were still working on this when we noticed that the Google penalty has been removed from her webmaster tools account and that in fact the site is beginning to rank slightly better.
Can anyone explain how this has happened when we hadn't submitted another reconsideration request (in fact we can't because the link to this has gone), or a further disavow links submission? Has this happened to anyone else?