It makes sense that if you do something wrong to a friend or colleague, they may trust you less. For them to forgive you, it might take time. You might have to prove to them over that time that you are not taking advantage of them by forgiving them too quickly.
Well, some algorithms at Google may do the same.
Simon asked the question at the 23:40 mark into yesterday's Google Hangout on Google+ with John Mueller.
Simon asked about time delays and how sites can take some time to recover. He asked how maybe algorithms require to see that the site doesn’t repeat the offense as soon as it recovers. Does Google wait to make sure they don't repeat the offense he asks. I added to that question, why does an algorithm need to wait, we know manual actions might wait a bit but if they are fast, why wait?
John Mueller answered that they do sometimes wait, but added “when it's running all the time sure” you don’t need to wait. He added that sometimes they need to see the data settle down before the algorithm can take notice, so maybe that is the issue.
He said:
Yeah but then that's something that can happen in a little bit faster but sometimes we do you just want to make sure that things have settled down and in a stable state.I don't know specifically with regards to the Panda sites that you mentioned there. So that's something where if you have examples, links to old forum threads where that's kind of discussed I would love to take a look to see what has been happening there. But in general it's not the case that algorithm would have to like wait a year for for things to settle down. Usually see more of a technical issue that we kind of need to wait until the data has stabilized.
Forum discussion at Google+.