Should I remove a high traffic page on my website?

[Cabaretti]

For the last few years, a particular blog post on my site has gotten 3 times as much traffic than any other page, even the home page; however, the topic of the post is only moderately related to the website topic and I'm wondering if all that unrelated traffic is negatively effecting SEO for our primary keywords.

Here's an example....

• Site topic: Yoga retreats in Costa Rica (we want to attract people who are interested in booking a yoga retreat)
• Blog Topic: How to extend your visa in Costa Rica (it's related only because it's about Costa Rica and travel, and may help our visitors stay longer)

Other Notes:

• In 4 years, visitors to that blog post have never converted.
• Blog post bounce rate is 56%, significantly higher than almost any other page
• Lots of comments on the blog post so visitors to it are engaged and find it very useful
• To get an accurate reading of interested visitors to the site, i always have to filter entrance visits to this post in my analytics because these users are not an accurate representation of the visitors we're trying to draw.

My question: Because I get so much traffic from the blog post, which is about the visa renewal process, will Google consider the website less about yoga and more about visas? If so, will it make it more difficult to rank well for yoga in Costa Rica? Does Google say to itself, "Hey, this website can't be an authority about both yoga and visas in Costa Rica so we're going to consider it a visa site because of all the visits and engagement it gets for that topic."

So should I remove the post or just leave it alone? It offers a lot of people valuable information so I would never delete it entirely, but would redirect it somewhere else.

Thanks!

[Cabaretti]

Thanks. That's the most well-conveyed answer I've been given for this question.

[EGOL]

I agree with everything that effectdigital has posted.

If that page about visas is pulling in the traffic and not converting, I would make sure that it has some visible Adsense on it. 

Several years ago, I added one wildass article to one of my sites and lots of my visitors consumed it.  So, I added another, and lots of people consumed it, and the both of them were pulling in good traffic from search.  Today, there are about 100 articles in this vein on the site, and the category page for this content ranks #1 for a one word query related to this content that most people would think to be crazy difficult.   This stuff pays, and the rest of my site has no problems ranking for anything.

[effectdigital]

It's true that the post may slant Google's view of what your site is about. That being said, removing the post won't make your other pages rank better and it may drop your PageRank. If you want to see those kinds of traffic levels, whilst having better qualified traffic (from more relevant keywords) then creating new successful content is the answer. Deleting stuff seldom leads to gains in Google's SERPs, it's seen as the easy way out and is not rewarded (9 times out of 10)

It's not that the post will block you from ranking where you want to rank, it's simply that none of your keyword 'aligned' content (for the terms which you do want to rank for) was proven to be 'as good' as the post which hogs all the rankings. I don't really see why a site couldn't rank confidently for yoga and visas. Look at the UK, look at sites like Visit London. That site ranks for loads of terms which you might assume weren't directly related. SEO is usually about confidently stepping forwards with effort and insights, rather than culling things and sweeping stuff under the carpet