Changing Content

Complete change of subject on a site

[mn1dbp]

I made a website for a local charity and hosted on it on my own domain name for around 6 months. The domain name had nothing to do with the subject of the charity website (it is a fairly commercial domain in the form - widget-spares.com).

I have since persuaded the charity to get their own domain and website and have moved all the pages across.

I am now intent on making a site on the original domain that is do with the correct subject. My question is will Google still associate the theme of this site to the former content (it still indexs some of it even though it doesn't exist) or will it pick up the new content and realise the site theme has changed. I have tried to get all the former links to the charity site changed to the new URL but some still exist.

I beleive the site gets visited by bots fairly often as the Google cache is recent and i see:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; [help.yahoo.com...]
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma)
FAST-WebCrawler/3.8 (crawler at trd dot overture dot com; htt
Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 Dead Link Checker (wn.zybor << not sure who this one is?

in my log files.

[Stefan]

Welcome to WW.

will it pick up the new content and realise the site theme has changed

Yes, it should pick up the new content fairly soon but the "site theme" isn't really a factor... G mostly just sees individual pages.

It might take a while before the moved charity pages finally disappear from the serps, but the new pages should show up before too long.

[jtbell]

One thing you can do that might speed up the transition is to install permanent redirects (HTTP status 301) on your server, for the pages that have moved. Ask your Web hosting provider about it, or consult your server documentation, or do a Web search for "301 redirect apache" or "301 redirect iis" or whatever is appropriate.

[mn1dbp]

Many thanks for the responses.

It seems i should just carry on writing new content and let Google do the rest.

The charity site meanwhile seems to be doing much better on its own domain and gets a fresh tag every 2 or 3 days and any new content is indexed within the same time frame. It has PR of 4 with a DMOZ listing and within the last week or so this shows on the Google directory.