You may recall a post I wrote a few weeks ago asking whether the topic of a website affects the length of time it takes to get indexed in Google.

I also posted the question on the discussion forum at HighRankings.com (an SEO site). Here are the questions I asked and the expert answers I received in response:

Summary:

Site A (topic is home business) has been active for 10 weeks now and still isn't listed in Google. That seems like an awfully long time considering that I've done everything right in terms of having good, useful content as well as quality inbound links.

I created a new personal development site "Site B" and it was indexed within 24 hours. Although I'm pleased that Site B got indexed so quickly, I am puzzled by the delay in indexing Site A.

I did all the same things in setting up both blogs. In fact, you would think that Site A would be much more attractive to Google because it has 80+ articles compared with the mere three that Site B had when it was indexed. And Site B has only one inbound link so far, whereas Site A has 118 links from 62 different (legitimate) sites.

I've been scratching my head trying to figure out what's going on, and my theory is that it has something to do with the title and content of Site A (Home Business). Put bluntly, I'm wondering if Google is extra-wary of any sites that are to do with home business because there are so many "work at home" scams on the Internet.

Expert answers:

There is a statistical correlation between certain topics or categories of sites and poor search engine optimization practices. As the search engines improve their trust and spam filtering/detection capabilities, you should see some topic communities become isolated because a majority of their members lack trusted, high value inbound links.

Google in particular seems to be crawling trusted sites more frequently and untrusted sites less frequently. Hence, blog B could indeed be benefitting from very few links that are more trusted while blog A could be stuck in the untrusted link zone of a poorly perceived, untrusted community.

Although some people might tell you that the more competitive a topic, the longer it takes to get indexed...this is not accurate. The problem with competitive areas is not that they are treated "differently", simply that they are competitive. So there are lots more page competing for the same terms and therefore they are going to be harder to rank for even after your site has aged. And if the pages you are getting links from aren't trusted themselves, it's even harder to achieve good rankings.

Quick Glossary: