Changing Themes, will google play along?

[JeremyL]

OK I have a site, which I want to be an idustry specific directory that will be adverised in and visited by prospective clients. The thing is, there is fierce competition, so I am starting out by offering free hosting to the people I hpe some day will be my advertisers.

My delima is, since I have talk of webhosting splattered all over the site right now, I am afraid google and other SE's will categorize me as a web host, and when the site flips to what it is really intended to be, the theme of web hosting will stick and I will never get SE rankings for my desired terms in the industry.

So should I put up a robots.txt file asking all the se's (Im mainly worried bout google) not to index the site until it is changed over to what it will be in 6 months? Or do you think I will have no issue with the transitions? Also if I do the robots.txt file, will I be penelized after I take it off?

By the way if I did the robots.txt, what would it look like to have 100% of the engines not index 100% of my site and it's subdirectories?

[fathom]

Why not do both.

Assuming for the moment that webhosting is less competitive and there is qualified traffic on this term it should be relatively easy to develop higher ranks with less effort.

In this case on-page content (text) could develop this by itself.

Within your site use webhosting as both page text and link anchor but off site (receiving links) make the link anchor >web hosting< therefore starting this immediately (since this is the future).

If you rank #1 for >webhosting< easily and early on... change a text word and link anchor slowly on a page to web hosting maybe each update and when a slight drop (ranked #2 or so) occurs put the last change back in. This is now your minimum performance threshold to remain #1.

...now simply push web hosting like mad, but occassional add a link for webhosting to preemptively remain ahead of the competition.

[JeremyL]

I thought about doing something like that, I'm just so afraid of getting themed as a host when that really has nothing to do with the site and it's contents. I remember long ago, Brett saying something about a site of his (I think either sew or ww) being themed as an auto related site and that it took him forever and a day to correct the issue. I am just hoping to avoid that.

Thanks
Jeremy

[ciml]

After removing the /robots.txt, Google should treat you just as if you never had it. The only difference would be if people had been less keen to link to you.

Also, I don't think that Google will remember the theme of your site from before the change. After two updates you should be judged only on what is the case, not what was the case (excepting some penalties that can be remembered for a long time).