How long should it take for a site to get re-crawled and re-ranked after cleaning out low quality pages?

• We recently removed several thousand low quality pages from our site when we realized that Google has stopped crawling them and our rankings had dropped significantly. As such we removed about 75% of our pages and kept what we felt were the top 25%. However, it's been almost two months since we submitted a new sitemap and we're wondering how long we should expect to wait before Google notices the change and our rankings might start improving?

Answer:

Google's John Mueller addressed this type of question a while back and said,

I would assume that takes a couple of months, maybe half a year – something along those lines. Because we really need to take the time to understand the essential new site that we find like that.

So, in a way, you're starting back on square one and Google will take some time to notice that the quality of the site has improved before they gradually start crawling more and more of your pages at which time, hopefully, your rankings will start improving. But the downside is that it can take a while, possibly even more than half a year.

Once again, this underscores the importance of quality over quantity. Google expects you to create high quality pages and that should be your primary focus from the beginning and throughout all of your SEO strategy.

Here's the discussion which starts at 29:16...