Google’s John Mueller has posted several tweets that show that it takes a lot of time to get your website ranked after a penalty.
For example, a webmaster complained that he didn’t receive an answer to his reconsideration request after three weeks. John Mueller said it takes time to process reconsideration requests:
Sometimes it can take a bit time to be processed.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) October 14, 2019
Some days later, John Mueller said that Google needs time to process the changes after lifting a penalty:
Once a manual action is removed, the site is immediately free of the manual action that was affecting it. However, the effects of that might take a bit of time to be reprocessed.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) October 18, 2019
Your website must show the right signals
Your website won’t automatically get high rankings when Google lifts a penalty. Your web pages have to send the right signals so that Google finds them relevant. The Top 10 Optimizer tool and the website audit tool help you to ensure that Google finds your pages relevant: