What if I change half my homepage to a different topic?

[Onders]

Hi all!

Am hoping to hear some feedback and thoughts / experiences from you all about linking profile and content.

I work for a site that's very well optimised. Lots of backlinks, lots of content, and number one rankings for pretty competitive terms. Easily the number one in our niche.

The backlinks all reflect the current proposition. We are thinking of branching out though - and looking into something new.

If for example we are all about "blue widgets" at the moment, and this is what our backlink profile also shows, what do you think would be the impact on rankings of giving up half our homepage to "blue somethingelse" - I suppose you could call it "red widgets", but what I'm trying to suggest is that it is less widget based, but more generalist colour based!

Hope that makes sense - and look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Thanks

[tedster]

I think it's a risky thing to try - given all that Google does with semantics these days. It would take some strong overriding business case to get me to recommend something like that on a successful website.

[freejung]

I went through this a couple of years ago in my day job when we acquired a new product that was only tangentially related to the business we'd been doing for more than a decade. It took a while for Google to sort it out, but we didn't have a lot to lose because we didn't have a lot of search traffic at that time anyway. We've added a lot of great content and got a lot of great links since then, and we're doing much better, but I still think the dual-themed-ness of our site is holding us back and if I had it to do again I would strongly recommend just starting another domain for the new product.