Yes there are techniques. social bookmark the pages you want to be indexed. this will get teh google spiders to crawl them. It is also possible that the size of you site is contributing to the slow indexing of new pages. if the pages you mention are very deep into the site the spiders will take longer to index them because there's more chance of time outs etc and the spiders just not finding them. As for a penalty if that's the case there's not aot I can tell you other than stop doing what is getting you the penalty if that's the case. But try social bookmark the pages you wan't indexing. Not just Dofollow links either a nice blend of the two will help you recieve the best results with indexing. And make sure that the page names are lower case text without to many symbols. the spiders don't like symbols and this could also be a reason for slow indexing. hope that helps
