I asked whether it would "negatively affect my website's ranking in the search engines if it covers a broad range of subjects", and the reply was that "I think it does affect it negatively. And not so much because you have a variety of topics but because engines now focus so much on quality of inbound links... I think having multiple topics devalues your site and makes it look like you're trying to do too much."
"And as far as rankings I do believe Google would rank you lower for chess related keywords compared to someone who's site is entirely devoted to chess.
If you think about it, popular sites are all focused around one niche. And the ones that aren't (Yahoo, MSN, CNN, etc.) are all heavily popular, branded sites that we all know we couldn't compete with because we don't have the brand awareness.
Niche sites are always best."
But instead of deleting all my content about different topics, I figured that I should put my individual niches into subdomains (which Google treats as a completely different website), each focusing on their own topic, to avoid this "negativity" when a website covers a broad range of topics, as well as to avoid deleting the content I tried so hard to make on this "range of topics".
Some examples of subdomains
http://chess.geniusprophecy.com/
http://runescape.geniusprophecy.com/
http://rubikscube.geniusprophecy.com/
