Google - Historical Memory?

Once a site about widgets, always a site about widgets?

[tomthumb2000]

I have a personal site that uses my penname (also the name of a fictional character) and with age it has now risen to a PR5. It's essentially pretty useless to me as almost all the visitors arrive by searching for this fictional character's name, despite all the various content and titles being very distinct.

I want to change all the content and use the site for a new project with a tight keyword niche and theme, essentially a widget review site, but will google catch on and start to give me traffic for the new keywords (there is already an incoming dmoz link for this keyword area), or will it persist, as now, in sending me people looking for searches involving this fictional character?

Google is like an old aunt who only sees you as the 8 year old with chocolate smeared on your cheeks...

[Sweet Cognac]

I would say it's a toss up, since google doesn't seem to be spidering entire sites right now.

It may take awhile for it to get updated, but eventually it should be ok.

But, what about the websites linking to you because it's about a fictional character? A PR5 is nothing to fool around with.

[Stefan]

I want to change all the content and use the site for a new project with a tight keyword niche and theme

There's a good chance of it being "Sandboxed". Don't assume that the new traffic will resemble the old - you're changing the entire theme of the site - there have been many posts here in the past by people who have made giant changes to a domain, and then immediately gone to page 30. As noted in the other msg, you have a PR5, why mess with it? It could be more valuable as a source of discreet links to other sites you want to boost.

<edit>a typo, as usual</edit>

[edited by: Stefan at 1:28 am (utc) on July 29, 2006]

[steveb]

Both. It will rank you for the new stuff, but it will continue to rank you for the old content (poorly) for at least months and probably for a year or more (presuming there is at least one link or word on the page relevant to the old content).

[tomthumb2000]

Thanks for that.

The traffic right now is pretty lousy (60 visits a day) so i wouldn't be risking too much. I guess i just don't want to create an entire new site if google won't recognize the new theme of the site.

Like right now there's a 150,000 words up there that are bringing in precious little traffic, mainly because google is more or less ignoring the titles and keywords and continuing to send traffic on what it thinks the site is about - this fictional character.

I got to the point where i thought about developing a site entirely about this fictional character if google likes it so much...