Question about ranking and changing a site

[kippie]

My site www.example.com has a pagerank of 4. Most url's of my site (www.example.com/map/1.html) have a pagerank of 3 or 2. What will happen with these pageranks if I would change my whole site, I would change the content, all url's, the names of the url's? Will the pagerank of www.example.com remain 4 or will it go down?

(by the way: the general content of the site will remain the same, but all specific texts have to be changed)

[edited by: tedster at 8:55 pm (utc) on Jan. 25, 2010]

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:24 am (utc) on Jan. 26, 2010]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[aristotle]

Are you mainly worried about losing pagerank or traffic? In any case I think a sudden major change would be risky. Do you really need to eliminate the existing URLs with pageranks 2 or 3? If it were me, I would try to keep these and slowly change their content. Another idea would be to try to keep most of the existing pages as they are, and create new pages for the new content.