What to do with mismatched blog content?

[reichconsulting]

I've maintained a blog on my website https://www.reich-consulting.net/ for quite a few years for my side business, which recently became my full-time gig.  Since 2003 I worked as at IT Specialist at a technical school and I blogged about everything from tech support and IT issues to web design and development.

Now I'm a full-time web developer.  I get a lots of traffic from some of these blog posts, but it doesn't seem to be useful traffic.  For example someone whose searching for a solution to a super-specific windows error (one of my most popular posts) isn't going to be interested in hiring me for web development. Furthermore I have a concern that these pages might be doing a disservice to the primary message of the  website, which is small business website design and web marketing. When I look at my top search terms in Google Search Console, these random terms from old blog entries are the top 30 terms... website design-related content doesn't even rate.

Any thoughts? Should I keep that content? Remove and 301 redirect it? Figure out a creative way to use it to my advantage?

[KaneJamison]

There are 2 schools of thought here:

The pure old school SEO approach is to leave all of that content on the site so long as it meets some basic content quality requirements like length, non-duplication, etc. If those posts have a good number of inbound links (more than 5-10% of your link profile), then there's an even stronger argument to leave them there, and just publish some new content so that they go deeper into your archives.

I think that's a perfectly legitimate approach in this case, unless you're getting tons of annoying contact form submissions from people wanting help with problems you don't want to be involved with. That would be a good argument for removing these posts.

The second angle is the editorial content purist approach. This approach would say "traffic and links be damned, if it doesn't convey the intended message to your target audience, kill it." If your content was really off topic - like a gardening tutorial, I would recommend this route.

However - your content is related to IT and programming from what I can see - eg a post about Accessing Networking Settings in Windows XP. In my opinion, that type of content is still compelling to a small business owner who might hire you, because it's further proof that you're technically savvy. From that standpoint, I think you could make a good argument for leaving that content in place.

The final point is whether Google thinks your site is about SEO/web design, or about IT support. This is a legitimate concern. I would address it by simply adding a lot of new blog posts over the course of the year, entirely dedicated to web design and marketing. It's possible to "retrain" Google's understanding of what your site is about by doing this consistently enough. Here's a great post that I think would be a good tactic for you to pursue while retraining Google to understand your site's new purpose: http://www.anumhussain.com/presentations/topics-over-keywords.

[Lumina]

In general, I think it's never a good idea to outright remove or delete a blog post - especially one that may actually be helpful to proper visitors. In this case, I'd suggest setting blog posts that disrupt your site's flow/funnel or otherwise cause this sort of issue to "no-index". Deindexing posts / pages like this will remove them from SERPs, but will leave them accessible to visitors. Don't be too heavy-handed with de-indexing though. Do this to one or a few posts, and see how that effects your site after a month. Then, if it's had a benefit, you could de-index more (not all) posts like this.