How long does it take for SEO efforts to materialise?

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

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  Michael Martinez: Group expertIf the content was taken offline for a couple of months, you`re essentially starting over with a clean slate. All the natural signals the shop had accumulated have been lost. There is no guarantee the site will recover those lost rankings naturally because the Web has changed so much.
  
  That said, it could eventually do much better. Without any optimization you just have to wait and see.
  
  "...how long does it take for SEO efforts to materialise?"
  
  It depends on what those efforts are. Some SEO tasks have immediately benefits, such as fixing technical problems with the Website.
  
  Some SEO efforts require a few weeks or months to show their benefit. That`s because it takes the search engines time to find and assess whatever signals are being created or improved.
  
  And sometimes you can do a great job of optimizing a site but you don`t see any apparent change because you`re competing against other sites that are also optimizing for search.
  
  In general, if the site`s indexation improves, if it`s time-to-indexing improves, if the number of long tail queries for which it earns impressions and clicks improves - those are all signs that search engine optimization is working, even if you`re not hitting the rankings for specific queries you`d like to.
  
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  Helmut Berié: what Michael said. in addition:I typically try to explain this putting myself in the role of Google.Google tries to find enough relevant results for any KW. If they have enough, they don`t care the domains those results are on. For you to be able to get back the positions you once had, you have to be more relevant than the current incumbents.Don`t expect Google to give you back your old spots, they are now owned by other sites. that might be perceived to be unfair (as in: "my results are as good as theirs"), but again Google doesn`t care
  
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