I bought the domain MJHQ.com, a Michael Jackson website with a PR of 3. I bought it and am turning it into a website called My Job Headquarters. I know I won't keep the Michael Jackson rating, but will already being indexed on Google under a different topic help me? Most importantly, should I resubmit my website to major search engines? Or will Google simply reset my PR once they notice the website content has changed?
More than likely they will just reset your domain to 0 and put you in the "sandbox" for awhile until they learn more about what the site is about now. All the incoming links which were about MJ will probably become useless in the next month or two.
What if you're having a news site?? every 3-4 hours a different frontpage story. I don't think google is going to reset you're site. If the site is out of the sandbox you're safe.
From what I understood, the site is totally changing from a Michael Jackson fan website to an employment site. I don't think it is going to matter how many times you change the index page, the site content will change and that's all the matters to Google. The "sandbox" is created because of totally changed content, not just because the domain is new. Also, Google will eventually see a change in ownership of the domain and many believe this can also change PR to 0.
Change in ownership plays no part in PR as long as you aren't talking about an expired domain. You never need to submit a site to search engines. Since your domain is already indexed the bot will visit and note the changes - although it can take a while for the old pages to be removed from some search engine results. Just change the content and start getting links from sites relevant to the new site. PR will still pass from any backlinks to the old site that remain, but it isn't going to do anything to help you with SERPS.
i would say, it isn't going to do MUCH to help you with SERPS. Links from sites with differnt content can also help, to a smaller extend, IMHO. Anyways, the advice is do NOTHING It cant be worse than a new domain in anycase. Resubmitting is meaningless, in any case.
If there is any benefit, it is so small that it doesn't help for all practical reasons. I have experimented alot with this with sites in the same sector. A site with 100 relevant links far outranks a site will 10,000 non-related backlinks (and I started with a small number and increased to this number) - even though they have the same PR, domains are approximately the same age. Quality links play a huge role with google, and not nearly as much with MSN and Yahoo.
Your pagerank won't change if you already have links to your site. And it's ok to change topics if you want, but the current links really won't do you much good if they have "michael jackson" in the link text, so even though you will have pagerank already you will have to start over with getting links with the proper link text for your seo campaign.