I know it may be an obvious answer, but does completely changing the content under a domain name significantly affect the PageRank? That is, without any real new promotion/backlinks etc, just a change of topic.
I completely changed www.hkhangfong.com from a electronics website to seo related website, and saw no PR changes then.
Page rank will only change if you change link structure, ie if you change the page names and the way the pages link to each other, then the page rank of thos pages may change, however the rank of your homepage should remain the same
Yes PR is based on your amount of incoming links but by changing your web site from electronics to SEO your incoming links are now very poor in terms of quality as they are on a entirely different topic!
it does not effect the PR... however it will effect to drop PR because you will lose relevant income links because you change the topic.... But it will highly effect SERPs for your site if you change the content of your site
Short term there is no effect but as already stated, in the long term your links will start disapearing.
Well, I completely changed structure of one of my older sites and I lost 1 point on PR, but I hope that it will go up again with the next PR.
Who cares about PR. Doing what you stated is a SURE way to throw up flags to google and thus crush your rankings b/c you get penalized. I have seen this happen several times to "authority" sites. When doing something of this nature its good to do it very slow and steady, just dont hit a switch per se.
The reason of the change did not have another motive apart from i had a domain which was stale and used it for a new site.