Changing a niche but keeping the domain
 

I want to change the niche of my site. It is an adult website and I want to change it to another adult niche. It will target for other keywords than before. Let's say I have a website about celebs nudity and I want to change it to webcam niche. The site has a great authority and earned many valuable backlinks.

So will it rank for new keywords, it still ranks for some keywords for the old niche (as I said before it has some great backlinks but I do not control them so I will not change the keywords for it).

Most likely, but I can't say how high. But I am quite sure that google will index that page if there is something in the first place and show it in search results, but dunno whether it is in #1 position on #100 000 position.

Though your current relevant backlinks will become as irrelevant backlinks. So, less linkjuice from those.

Correct, I worry that the old backlinks will hurt the seo. Plus, many of them will point to no existing pages (which I will delete after changing the niche).

It has 40 Page Authority and 30 Domain Authority.

Total Active Backlinks:
8,343
Unique Active Backlinks:
49
Links to Home Page:
8,300
Nofollow Links:
19.7%
Last Update:
17 Jul
Industry:
adult
Link Influence Score:
47%

I don't think that those old links would hurt your seo. At least after a while. It is also a good practice to redirect the old links (the pages); front page would be good option as the links are irrelevant.

When deleting old pages, don't leave them to 404 as this will affect your rankings. Instead 301 redirect them to your index page.

I thought there will be more backlinks, almost 50 backlinks is not that much so I think it will be not a problem. The site is one year old.

Now what you suggest to do, delete all previous posts, how about the sitemap and other things?

Thanks.

How to do it?

If you establish all new site, you of course delete all previous stuff, including sitemap; you don't need sitemap about a site you don't anymore have (besides the domain). If it is automated sitemap like some plugin in Wordpress, you probably don't have to do anything (as it updates automatically).

301 redirects can be done through .htaccess file or with some plugin (if you have Wordpress, etc.)

Thanks, so I delete the old posts, sitemap and then after a few days I can submit the new sitemap?

I am using Google XML Sitemaps plugin and the sitemap is submitted to the google webmaster central.

What else you could recommend to do?

If you're using wordpress, take a look at this plugin:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/link-juice-keeper/

Should still work on newer versions of wordpress ...

It does not make sense to make a change, if you have good authority and links. It would be better to rework the sites, so you promote live cams, based on what you already have. If you want to make another site, register a new domain, and go from there.

As I just added in the previous post; if the sitemap is automatic you don't have to do anything if it updates properly. Though for example many sitemap plugins create a new sitemap if there isn't any, so deleting the old one is just fine.

If you mean submitting sitemap into google, you can submit it as soon as you have something to submit (aka site up).

Nothing else comes into my mind. This is quite simple case. Well.. one thing came into my mind. If you have similar site than you are now giving up (the old niche), you can of course redirect the relevant links to some another relevant site. But I don't know the exact effects of this as usually when thing like this is done, the old domain is not used again for something else. At least visitor wise it would be more user friendly as they would land on relevant page.

How do you know it?

Maybe my niche is not profitable or any other reason which you do not know, plus my domain can be rebranded to other porn niches so it makes sense. I am just worrying about old backlinks and how google will react to that change. I mean, when I will delete all 2 thousands posts and start a new site from scratch. Is there possibility of penalty or something of this kind?

Thanks guys.

I would not delete the 2000 posts too, I would move it somewhere else. What is the domain name? If it is something of high value, and hard to get, I guess it can make some sense. You can probably redirect links to a different domain, and keep most of the link equity too.

Better to redirect to a deeper and more relevant page than the index.

Who says you can't have a few pages with some of the old niche content on it?

Yeah, I will save all the posts on the disk but I will delete them from the site when I decide to change the niche. Yes, the domain is really nice and I think it can be re-branded to for example webcams, dating, vouyer niches. I will not post the domain name here for some reasons but it contains a two words, one of them is "nudes".

If that was the intent, he'd be just as well not deleting the pages. My assumption was that the pages wouldn't exist in any capacity. But yes, if he's inclined to recreate the pages he deletes in som fashion, then I would definitely recommend redirecting to them individually.

Well, the posts which I have are not related to these which I will add.

Knowing the domain name, would be the best. I would look at Semrush Rank, Alexa Rank, SimilarWeb traffic, seo parameters from Ahrefs.com, and Majestic.com, number of pages indexed in Google and Bing, and other things like that. It would be good to look at the website too, how it is constructed, what are the categories, and internal linking, and other things like that.

You said, that the website has links, and authority, and if this is really the case, this can have a lot of financial value. I guess your goal would be to use this to make money, and it could be a lot better to keep the current site as is, and start with a new one, and link to it from this one, lets say.

Either way, deleting a site with a lot of backlinks, and starting putting something else on this domain, does not sound like a good idea, unless we are talking about a domain like porn.com, sex.com, or something like that. Even then, this would need to be looked into, and planned, and possibly kept as is too.

Edit: Even if you have something like CelebNudes.com, registering something like HotCelebNudes.com and working on that, would not make a lot of a difference.

This is freeones.com. What are the parameters of your domain?

http://s2.postimg.org/844nrwuuh/freeones.png

Total Active Backlinks:
8,343
Unique Active Backlinks:
49
Links to Home Page:
8,300
Nofollow Links:
19.7%
Last Update:
17 Jul
Industry:
adult
Link Influence Score:
47%

So there are only 20-30 backlinks to posts, the rest is linking to the domain.

Interesting. Much backlinks from Google plus to an adult site (despite Google's tight policy). I wonder how well that works.

I will copy and paste the results, what site it is?

ahrefs.com. If you don't want to paste, you can give URL Rating, Domain Rating, Backlinks, Referring Domains, Referring IPs, Dofollow / Nofollow. Also, how much daily google.com traffic do you have, and how many pages indexed in google.com, based on Google Webmaster Tools.

Global ranks is high, so that is one of the main reasons why I want to change the niche.

URL Rating
30
Domain Rating
46
Backlinks
117K
Referring Domains
121

Referring Pages 116,756
Total Backlinks 117,011
Crawled Pages 21,164

Referring IPs 117
Referring Subnets 113
Referring Domains 121
Governmental 0
Educational 1
.com 67
.net 16
.org 13

text 116,953 100%
dofollow 94,159 80%
nofollow 22,794 19%
redirect 0 0%
image 425 0%
form 0 0%
Governmental 0 0%
Educational 2 0%

I guess you know what you are doing, and what you want to do. There is links to the domain, but it is nothing very spectacular, I would say, so you are not losing much. I think that you should be able to put all the content on a different domain, or even a subdomain, and redirect all the backlinks there, even something like old-domain.com/page-one, to new-domain.com/page-one. Or you can delete it all together, and go from there, too.

I am just worrying about old backlinks, I will contact some webmasters as much as I can to change the anchor and how google will react to that change. I mean, when I will delete all two thousands posts and start a new site from scratch. Is there possibility of penalty or something of this kind?

I don't think there is any penalty for such. Doesn't make any sense. Few years back there was still some talk about Google's "sandbox", so you may get back into that, but seems unlikely because you have decent amount of backlinks (domain is not new). Google has moved towards never content in the expense of older one, so "sandboxes" if there is such anymore, doesn't apply that much.

There is no penalty for this. You are insisting on deleting it, so delete it, or better move somewhere else, online, so you can still make some $$$ from that work that was done. If you can change anchor text of the links, that's good, and I would make sure that no links get 404 errors, after you delete the content from the site.

If you want to delete it, delete it, and go from there. Like I said, it is not a $20,000 website, or anything like that.

So I delete all posts then 301 redirect links to the index page. After that delete the sitemap from the site and google, then add some posts and later on submit the sitemap to the google. Is it correct?

What else I should also do?

If this is Wordpress, it may not be easy to move the post to another Wordpress, programmatically, but it could work. There is plugins for it, by I remember working on something like that by hand, but it was around 100 posts, and not as many as you have there, so working on yours by hand, would not make sense.

301 redirect is what is needed, as it will pass link value. If you can create pages and direct links to there, this would be good too, meaning, not all links go to just the main page. It is good for seo to have links to the Main Page, and also Content Hub A, Content Hub B, and so on. I am not sure if this will be very important here, though. Just redirect everything to the main page, and it should work.

You don't have to delete the sitemap from Google Webmaster Tools, you can just update the current one, so it does not show any posts. If it is Wordpress, it would be good to be using Yoast, but it is not the only plugin for this.

Your site may disappear from search results for a certain period of time, as they will not know exactly what is going on, and they wont be serving bad results to people, I think. After some time, everything will go back to normal.

If you have links that are like "nude celebs", you can create a set of pages for this, something like domain-name.com/nude-celebs, nude-celebs/one.html, nude-celebs/two.html, and then redirect all these links to that too. This way links will be relevant, you will have a Content Hub A, and this will be better for seo too.

This is not difficult, overall. You will know how to do it, and what should be the result of this.

Which plugins you recommend for sending broken links to homepage to keep the linkjuice. Anything else than Link Juice Keeper?

You can do it in .htaccess, I think, and you don't need a pluging for this. Redirecting links with a plugin, sounds like a lot of mess.

How I do it?

Anyone using https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

google.com -> "301 redirection htaccess"

Broken link checker reviews