Just bought a PR4 financial site

[thesadshow]

I just bought a financial site with a 6 year old PR4 domain. The articles are all very old and basically useless, so my plan is to restructure the site entirely and make completely new content.

Will it hurt the site / domain's pagerank and other factors if I totally redo the site? Under the same niche obviously. Or should I somehow keep the current content stored somewhere hidden and then make only the new categories and content visible to users?

I want to do this right and don't want to mess up how much G likes this site at the moment.

 

[ghassan1988]

Keep the old content, and post new articles to your home page.

 

[SOCOM]

You'd be crazy to remove the old content that Google has taken into account with its PR status.

 

[tranza]

404 error are a nightmare, keep your content like it is.

 

[reallife]

What I've done is leave all the content on its old pages, and made a new homepage that links to the old homepage with a single link that says "archive site" - no other links to the old content on the new homepage.

 

[thesadshow]

What I've done is leave all the content on its old pages, and made a new homepage that links to the old homepage with a single link that says "archive site" - no other links to the old content on the new homepage.

Interesting. I don't like how the site is done and I want different category types, so this sounds like the best option for flexibility since I obviously need to keep all of the old content. The old content is useless crap that I pretty much want unseen so I like this, thanks.

 

[SEO_Alchemy]

Yea, deleting all the old content will destroy all your PR and your rankings now and in the future. You would have ridiculous amounts of broken links considering this is an old domain with PR 4, so its going to have an existing backlink profile, plus all the content you were being ranked on will be gone. You can 301 the entire site to a brand new domain which many companies do when re-structuring/expanding and is a completely natural move to google, but you will loose quite a bit of link juice and certainly all the rankings will be gone, and you would have to essentially re-rank all the keywords with new content. Best move is as the other have pointed out, just build on top with a new homepage... you can choose exactly what you want to show to your users. Just put a little link "main keyword archive" in the footer or somewhere inconspicuous, so that your still linking to all that content, and build away. You now have an authority aged site

 

[rasmusk]

That said, if you're going to delete the old content, you need to 301 the old URLs to the homepage, to keep the PR. Theres an plugin for wordpress, which is very handy, it is called 404 redirection.