In the long run it pays to make nice with Google. Play by their rules.
If you don’t, you are likely to get penalized, even blacklisted.
What then?
All is not lost. If you suspect you have a problem, the first step is to look over Google’s rules and your website, and see if you are violating them – or if perhaps you have a technical problem with the way your site is built.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines covers the possibilities in detail.
Once you’ve addressed that, make and submit a new site map to Google. But also, use the new “Fetch as Googlebot” and submit feature (both of these are in Webmaster Tools). This can materially speed up your site being re-indexed by Google. Within a few days you’ll see if changes you’ve made, have helped.
If you want to know if your site is blacklisted, set up a click ad campaign. That will quickly tell you if your ad is disapproved because your site doesn’t meet Google’s guidelines.
If there still seems to be a problem, it’s time to ask Google if you have a problem – or maybe you just need to do more work. Use their “reconsideration request” form, discussed in this article (with a link to the form).
There’s also a new video that talks about the reconsideration process in detail.
Even though Google doesn’t publish everything about how they rank websites – they do work hard to be as transparent as they can be. There is really no mystery to what it takes to succeed on the Internet.