I'm changing my website where the theme was political into a site that offers articles about anything. I went from 0 PR to 3 PR within three months of my site when it was political. Since I'm going away to a different theme - will that hurt my PR? Also, I'll be relying more on traffic from Google and just about all my articles are ranked on the first page in their niche. If my index PR goes from 3 to 0, will that lower my "sub pages" in the SERP's?
If your site is doing good, and all articles are ranked on first page, what's the point in changing the theme? Why don't you stat a new one instead of making changes to the existing one? Anyhow, PR will not be affected initially as the backlinks will still be there ... but in the long run if you fail to engage more backlinks it will drop .... and last but not the least, SERP is going to suffer.
There is no point in stating that a 3 month old blog on politics has attained a PR 3. Google, I suppose has given a PR 3 for most of the blogs out there, because my blog too got a PR 3 when I left it off just like that without posting any content for 3 months. And coming to the question, changing themes never affects the PR and your site value. Try to get more backlinks and go for directory submission. Its a waste of time and money.
You can change your site's theme as many times as you can. PR doesn't depend on it...but, make sure you put the same meta tags,etc to the new theme aswell.
How can you carry on with the same meta tags when you are going to change the whole theme of website ... he said i m changing the theme from political to a more general level ... now the old meta tags must be containing the keywords like politics, political, politic .... while the new website should be having keywords like business, articles, general, etc. As i said, initially the PR may not suffer but SERP are going to suffer for sure.
As far as i'm aware, PR shouldn't be affected by a theme change as it's down to the number and quality of backlinks. I agree with An_igma, if the current configuration is doing well, why change it, start a new theme and adopt the approach of the existing one.
Now that's some revelation .... PR has nothing to do with PR You meant to say nothing to do with theme? Another thing all of you guys are forgetting is that the sites giving backlinks to the old one may drop the link as soon as the theme is changed from politics to general. If that happens, you may have to start almost from the scratch ...
If your back link is drop than your PR defiantly will drop and so better thing is increase back link day by day and your your pr will increase. Because initially back links are play important role for PR not traffic.
I think a lot of people are confused here... bigcat is NOT talking about changing the 'look/feel' type of theme here (as in uploading a new theme folder to a wordpress install) - he's talking literally changing what the site is ABOUT.
PR doesn't mean that much... instead think of it from your customers perspective. Will changing the theme give customers a better online experience with your site? If so, make the changes and customers will likely spend more time on your site = more page views = increased pr/seo rankings
yes the website PR will be effected by changing the theme of website as the targeted keywords will be changed
I see no harm in website PR as you change your theme. However, Traffic might be affected; it might go better or worse depends on what theme you gonna use.