How long for a new small business site to come out of the sandbox?

[gomer]

I am helping a local business with a new site (in Canada). The site is 100% clean, original content (with a blog attached putting out a post a week), plain SEO no tricks, natural organic link building. My question is, how long do new sites (local businesses) typically take to get out of the sandbox?

Okay, it's been a while since I've posted here and frankly, I'm not even sure Webmasterworld calls it a sandbox. By sandbox I mean, how long before a site can freely compete in search results without being held back because of time/lack of trust, newness.

It's been about 6 weeks and it just ranks for a few long tail keyword phrases. For keywords it should rank for (later), it is not on the 7 or 8th page of search results so it is way down there.

To me, this is all expected because of sandboxing but am wondering how long this typically lasts for a small local business site nowadays.

Thanks for your help.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I have found that it depends on the niche but it is not getting any easier and I would think that it would take longer than 6 weeks.

[gomer]

Thanks BeeDeeDubbleU. Any guesses on how long this might take? Examples of niches and times would be great.

I'll throw out my guesses based on previous experience. I helped a local real estate site back in 2007 and it took about 10 months to a year. They did not put out regular content though.

This site is a local mortgage site, I'm thinking it could take 6 to 8 months, but am hoping sooner. If any experiences can be shared, it would be much appreciated.

[crobb305]

we've recently had a discussion about this that you may find helpful

[webmasterworld.com...]

[goodroi]

There isn't really a formal sandbox with a mandatory time period. It is more of minimum quality signals that Google is looking for.

If you know what you are doing you can get a site in a non-competitive area ranking relatively soon. In my experience most local business websites are not managed by smart webmasters and thus many of them never develop quality signals so they never rank.

[TypicalSurfer]

You can help it along pretty quickly with a few good inbound links. Don't go get a thousand crappy ones, just a few trusted type links will bring you out of darkness and you can build on that.

[gomer]

Thanks to all. crobb305 link to old thread was very useful as well.