Changing the theme of a site

[3zero]

This one has me scratching my head, I want to use a domain on a completely different theme but Google continues to try to rank it on the old theme. Obviously there is some categorization within Google and it refuses to let the site change theme. Anyone have a way round this?

[southflorida]

sounds like it has yet to be indexed with the new theme, Google has no say in theme... and is your wording correct? kind of confusing read. Can you be more specific? When was the site last indexed? are you looking at cashe dates, or a cashed page in the results... just by clicking the serp results you should still see the new theme, maybe if you are looking at a cashed page it would be the old one... when was the last time you cleared your cookies and cashe?

[3zero]

All new content all indexed and about a year waiting on new theme. I'm patient but a year is a long time to not have your site listed at all for its new keywords. Google I think categorize sites for certain keywords and breaking out of this is very difficult.

[MikeNoLastName]

Most likely you have back links still linking to you from some authority sites and these can go a long way (often more so than on-page content if your toolbar PR is lower than theirs) to convincing G of the old theme.

[aristotle]

Also, if you suddenly replace the old content of a site with completely new content, the google algorithm could notice that something abnormal has happened, and become cautious about giving the revamped site good rankings until some period of time has passed.

[lucy24]

Could you use a different word instead of "theme"? Whenever I see "theme" I think CMS details having to do primarily with stylesheets, maybe secondarily with exact layout of internal links. But here you're talking about topic or subject, right?

Has the domain belonged to you all along, both before and after the change in theme/topic/subject?

Do external links point to the front page or to internal pages? You can't do much about front-page links. But internal links to a pre-change site might not even be valid URLs any more.

[Sand]

How long has it been? I've drastically changed the focus of a domain before, and within a month or so everything seemed to settle down.

[3zero]

Thanks for your replies, just added webmastertools and found site was targeted to USA not UK - doh maybe that was the problem.