How long does it take to recover from a penguin manual action penalty?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Jelani Burton: Penguin Recovery
  How long does it take to recover from a penguin manual action penalty?
  Recovery after a penalty depends on backlink profile once the penalty has been lifted. What other factors come into play?
  Is it worth doing disavows or should you guys start fresh with a new site?
  
  Also, would anyone care to share the Penguin success stories?  ;Thanks. ;
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  Christina S: A Penguin penalty is not a manual penalty, it's algorithmic.
  Once the backlink profile is completely cleaned up  ;with the majority of  ;unnatural backlinks removed or nofollowed and the residual ones disavowed, then removal of the penalty takes as long as it's needed for Googlebot to establish that the unnatural backlinks are gone. This can take quite long depending how many are involved. There's no specific time-frame. Weeks, months.
  
  But you will not get rankings back to what they were way back before the penalty was applied since those rankings were based on unnatural links.  ;
  Having the penalty lifted will at least give your site the chance to rise naturally over time.
  
  If you are unable to clean up the backlink profile then it's likely the only solution is to start with a fresh domain and NOT 301 redirect the old one to it (as that would pass along the penalty as well). A newborn domain. All you may use are nofollowed links from your old domain's pages to the new domain's pages, and better to get rid of all the content as well so as not to create a duplicate content situation.
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  Marty Eigner: Manual penalties by Google and Penguin penalties are different. If you received a manual penalty from Google you should be able to recover as soon as you clean up your link profile.
  If you have had a Penguin algorithmic penalty you will have to wait until the next Penguin refresh before you can tell if the filter has been lifted from your site. 
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  Phil Buckley: +Christina S is correct when she says the time to crawl out is a Penguin hole depends on many factors, but expect about a year of pain and suffering for a medium size site. 
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  Jelani Burton: Thanks for chiming in +Christina S.  ;Anybody know of any successful penguin recovery case studies out there?
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  Brent Wildman: very well put +Christina S ;
  Here's a good case study I found about assessing and recovering from 2.0 ;http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/penguin-2-0-analysis-cheapoair/
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  Jelani Burton: Thanks +Brent Wildman ;very detailed write up.  ;I'm really looking for results from an attempt to disavow.  ;I appreciate the link, it was helpful.
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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: I would also suggest reading many of the articles about Penguin posted by +Glenn Gabe here too: http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/
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  Jelani Burton: Perfect. Thanks +Micah Fisher-Kirshner ;
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  W.E. Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:38:16 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/how_long_does_it_take_to_recover_from_a_penguin_manual_action_penalty