A few days ago I finally figured out how to properly submit sitemaps to Google. I tried doing that for one of the sites, and the sitemap was accepted. Now I can see that practically all of the pages were indexed.

My question is how soon after all pages are indexed can one really see the impact of it on traffic the site gets?

Best,

You can get visitors from Google only if the SE algorithm decides to rank your website top on some important keywords. But I suggest you to follow Google's guidelines only to avoid ban for your site. Otherwise you don;t need to follow them at all.

Was your website already listed in google and how old was it? I've seen it only impact sites that were super new or did not already have some sort of page linking most pages together. For instance a website that was near 6 years old didn't see very much impact when I submitted a sitemap and it got accepted.

If I don't follow Google guidelines at all and the site gets banned in the SE,what worse can happen than that??