How long does it take for spam link building to take effect?

[Joes_Ideas]

I saw a recent surge of a low quality website to the top of SERPS, and looking at the link profile is almost 5,000 newly acquired linking RD's, with a total of over 49,000 links. I looked at a bunch of the links and they are super spammy (foreign language, way unrelated and out of context, spam sites with garbage content, pages of paid links to the websites subpages, etc).

My question is, how long does it take for Google to recognize this and penalize this shady site?

[SoftzSolutions]

_Valid question as it seems. But there is no straight forward answer. If you ask any Google representative about this, he/she would suggest you flag the website. However, I have personally tried this but what it appeared to me that it never worked. It is a vicious circle. Google releases algo change > sites get panelized   > webmasters find loophole > spam sites start gaining on ranking. _

[SebastianCowie]

As far as I'm aware there's no set period for penalisations to take effect on sites that engage in shady practices. If they've gone OTT as you mention then it'll usually take the next Panda/Penguin to knock them off the top spot.

If you take a look at the results for a search like "payday loans" or "short term loans" it gives you a perspective on how efficiently Google is handling new domains with thousands of new backlinks.

You could attempt to submit a spam report but by the time it gets sorted they'll probably have a new domain ready to go.