changing website purpose

[emils]

Hi everyone,

I have a regional, non-english directory that has a PR5 and a few hundreds backlinks towards it. Now I have been thinking about this for a while. I intend to change the website's content and purpose completely, from being a non-english directory to an english informational website with good content, but obviously on a completely different topic.

Question is, has anyone tried something like this, and how well did the website perform? What would be the results that i may expect, in your opinion.I am concerned that many of the existing links will have very different keywords in anchor text. Will these still count as to giving my site better results in SERPs?

I will be also moving the website to an US based server for IP localization reasons. Also working on getting new links with proper anchor text but this may take a while.

Any comments on the possible outcome of this endeavour would be appreciated. I hope I can find someone here that already had such experience personally.

[johngroup]

We worked on some directories that grew their topic base into subsections instead of replacing the content.

While they were all in English, the topic content was very different. We grew the topics to retain the traffic, links, PR and listings placed across the Internet.

Once the topics were recognized to be strong enough to stand on their own, we separated the topic sections to appear as separate directories.

[emils]

Originally Posted by johngroup

We worked on some directories that grew their topic base into subsections instead of replacing the content.

While they were all in English, the topic content was very different. We grew the topics to retain the traffic, links, PR and listings placed across the Internet.

Once the topics were recognized to be strong enough to stand on their own, we separated the topic sections to appear as separate directories.

Not a bad idea i guess - at least you get several directories but each one is focused on a specific topic or area of interest.

However, I refer to something quite different. Getting a site from non-english to english, and from a directory to a content-rich website, and changing topic completely. Basically only domain remains (and existing links which are lots and hard to change them) but otherwise the site is a completely diff thing. I wonder what effect would have the existing links and their anchor text in terms of expected traffic from search engines, particularly Google, to the new site. It is rather obvious that the new site will not rank high for its primary keywords (due to lack of inbound text with proper anchor text) - however I wonder if the site will still respond good to perhaps less competitive phrases based on PR passed, so that it still gets some traffic... and to determine whether this scenario worths trying or not.

[emils]

As a note - I currently have several new websites, so totally sandboxed... and looking at trying to use old, established domains which aren't that interesting anymore, for a brand new purpose and hopefully avoid the sandbox issue this way and get some decent start with them. I am not sure though if the scenario will work out.

[johngroup]

While your the inbound links will continue to boost popularity/PR, being from relative sites is a risk that may not work out.

To reduce the major issues with a re-design, my thought would be to retain the non-english section (along with the inbound links), create the new section(s) and direct links from the old section pages to the new pages.

Over time you could change the original inbound link text to fit your new English keywords.

[emils]

Originally Posted by johngroup

While your the inbound links will continue to boost popularity/PR, being from relative sites is a risk that may not work out.

Could you be more specific? What are exactly could be the risks of doing this.

Originally Posted by johngroup

To reduce the major issues with a re-design, my thought would be to retain the non-english section (along with the inbound links), create the new section(s) and direct links from the old section pages to the new pages.

Good advice indeed. We are already doing exacly that - but in a different fashion. The non english content will be moved to a new non-english site, which will take over the existing domain. We are going to 301 redirect all existing pages except the index, from the current domain to the new domain.

Originally Posted by johngroup

Over time you could change the original inbound link text to fit your new English keywords.

Guess we have to do that indeed. One thing that we can do for now is to add a few links from several sites that we control or partner with, using the new keywords.

We actually did a change like this, once in the past, about 1.5 years ago. We had a regional site that we transformed into an english website with a great deal of success. The whole process was very interesting; within one month Google has initially become 'confused' where it did not bring too many hits to the site, then completely reindexed us and suddenly instead of local visitors it started to bring US-based english visitors, accordingly with our new website content. This proves very well how G is actually looking at a site as a whole - once the english pages indexed have surpassed the non-english ones not yet discarded, Google has quickly shifted our site into its english index.

I wanted though to hear more opinions on this - one success doesn't mean it is always going to be a success.

[johngroup]

Potential risk: With the language base changing, the inbound links will be directed from sites that contain copy that doesn’t relate to the new English language on your site.

For the existing inbound links, providing new descriptions along with your new link titles would help alleviate this issue. But if the sites linking to you are in another language, their owners may not go along with this fix.

[janeth]

Is the domain name over two years old?

We have done it a lot of times with very little problems.

The links not being from the same type website will not hurt you. If you have good anchor text and good links and already rank because of those links and anchor text you will most likely continue to rank there.

We have done it a lot with a lot of sites and have never had any problems.

It is a lot like starting a new site.

[emils]

Originally Posted by janeth

Is the domain name over two years old?

We have done it a lot of times with very little problems.

The links not being from the same type website will not hurt you. If you have good anchor text and good links and already rank because of those links and anchor text you will most likely continue to rank there.

We have done it a lot with a lot of sites and have never had any problems.

It is a lot like starting a new site.

The domain is 3+ years and been in search engines since then. The domain is now holding just some general info page on index while rebuilding content. I'm trying to signal the change to search engines and obtain discarding of the old pages. So it is now in the transition process and it all looks ok; getting some hits already on the new keywords. I know already we are going to rank well at least on Yahoo, which has already seen the change and it indexes us on first page on results for some of the new keywords. Not bad. Google is slower on updating lately and it still holds more old pages than new ones - however I do not expect miracles overnight, it may take a while until the shift in content is detected fully. But I have the feeling it will be all ok. It may take time until we get most links text changed, but so far I have obtained changes in a couple higher PR sites and this seems to be working, at least in Yahoo already.

Thanks, janeth - and everyone else as well, for sharing the opinion on this matter, which is quite useful to know, in my opinion, for all cases when shifting website in a completely different direction is found desirable.

[emils]

This looks like it going to be a success. For anyone interested that may want to try this at home, here's an update on the progress.

We have moved existing directory website to a new domain (using 301 redirects) and added a few links to it. The new domain definitely works better than expected, for a brand new domain - 700 visitors per day already from Google and counting; former website did have a few hundreds backlinks and was performing at 1300 visitors per day.Hopefully the sandbox effect will not kick in next...

Google has also dumped all pages from the old domain. We are starting to place the new content on it, and hopefully we'll see some results in the next couple weeks.