Google's John Mueller on Penalty Recovery

the toolbar would show green in the meter to indicate the level of PageRank it had accrued.   This also meant that Google no longer showed the banned site in the search results if you searched with the name of the site or with random snippets from the site..   And in cases like that it's strong sign across the board because it looks like complete copy from somewhere else, or it's just scraping or spun content then we'll usually remove it from search..   so for instance if you take over domain that has action like this and you clean it up or you start fresh with new content and you submit reconsideration request then what will happen is first we'll have to start indexing this website again and that can take bit of time..   White Bar penalty is situation where site is not removed from the search results or the index.   The idea was that there was something wrong with bar site and that any site that linked to it would become untrusted and also acquire bar and lose rankings..   On the other hand, then usually that's something that's just matter of us recrawling, reprocessing those pages so that we understand that things are ok now..   My opinion, based on my almost two decades of experience in helping sites recover, is that once penalty has been removed, site is ranking where it's supposed to rank based on the content and or links..   If the problem was content, then the site would return if the quality content or doorway pages were removed and the remaining content had enough links and was of good quality..   It's also important to understand the difference between penalty and in the algorithm that results demotion.   Read more