Forum Moderators: phranque
Does your site have lots of content, and is that content compelling? If not, you will NEVER get significant search engine traffic.
If you *do* have lots of content, and it's compelling, and other quality sites have recognized that and linked to you, then I'd estimate you could start getting traffic in as little as a week, probably no more than a couple of months. People talk about a "sandbox" where new sites are held in limbo for months and months, but I think if you have a truly compelling, content-rich site then you would override any sandbox effect.
If you *do* have lots of content, and it's compelling, and other quality sites have recognized that and linked to you, then I'd estimate you could start getting traffic in as little as a week, probably no more than a couple of months. People talk about a "sandbox" where new sites are held in limbo for months and months, but I think if you have a truly compelling, content-rich site then you would override any sandbox effect.
Your "within a week" estimate is, shall we say, a wee bit optimistic. When a site is not getting found it does not attract links. That should be quite clear. The only way to get round this is with some sort of link building campaign and there have been reports that Google sees unnatural link building as just that, "unnatural", and a result imposes a filter. There is also some evidence that the age of the domain can have an effect and there is nothing you can do about that.
I don't think even truly compelling sites override the sandbox. During the last couple of years there have many stories in here about just such sites being sandboxed and only the odd one or two about those that were not. If I had to put an average figure on the effect of the sandbox I would say 6 to 9 months. If you require traffic sooner than this you should perhaps be looking at some other form of promotion or Adwords.
From your experiences how soon a search for the domain name (example.com) in google should return the website as the first search result? When I do a search for our domain name, the first three pages are websites linking to the main site, and only on the 4th page I see the main site. Is this the sand box symptom or something more serious like a ban?
