Should I redirect a popular but irrelevant blog post to the home page?

crichardson1992

Hi.

I'm trying to get my website; www.ciphr.com , to rank for keywords relevant to "HR Software" in the UK. It's a highly competitive industry and we rank ~mid to low on page one for some of our ideal keywords that are highly relevant and high volume.

Years ago we took the decision to blog about topics more loosely related to the world of work. One of our blog posts, about plants in the office https://www.ciphr.com/advice/plants-in-the-office/ is popular. It gets decent traffic and consistently builds backlinks to the post without any further effort on our part. The specific page has a PA of 46 and DA of 55 with >500 domains linking to it. This compares to our home page with a PA of 47 and 700 linking domains. It is typically the home page that ranks for our money keywords "HR Software" "HR Systems" in the UK.

Because this blog post is so loosely related to our actual business, the traffic it generates is highly unlikely to turn into a customer of ours.

I am considering redirecting the blog post to the home page to pass link juice to the home page. The concern I have is that, based on the anchor text and contextual signals from linking pages, Google might then infer that our home page is less relevant for our money keywords and more relevant for "plants".

Are my concerns unfounded? What are your thoughts? Should I redirect the blog post to the home page? Another internal page? Keep the blog post live?

Thanks

BlueprintMarketing

Happy I could be of help.

BlueprintMarketing

I agree with EGOL

Your ranking for lists of keywords and then he featured snippets. (big photo) https://imgur.com/tyle0ZZ.png

The https://www.ciphr.com/advice/plants-in-the-office/ page has 490 IPs (that's great!)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X21h8DOze5u9aUt1viivCllITCOIvBZag1eCxqPh0-U/edit?usp=sharing

This is a perfect example of off-topic content working very well to get backlinks as well as bring more customers on to Pingdom.com named

"Retro Delight: Gallery of Early Computers (1940s - 1960s) - Pingdom Royal"

https://royal.pingdom.com/retro-delight-gallery-of-early-computers-1940s-1960s/

<label id="url">https://www.pingdom.com/ a company now owned by SolarWinds does Website Performance and Availability Monitoring Site speed testing.</label>

I would definitely tell somebody who was creating content from the start or has a large amount of unrelated content without backlinks or any traffic to do something else but this is something relatable to human resources as well as beneficial to other people it's an excellent piece of content that I would definitely keep.

Hope this is been a help,

Tom

tyle0ZZ.png

EGOL

The specific page has..... >500 domains linking to it.

This is rocket fuel. Irrelevant articles help lots of websites.

Find the person who wrote that article for you and give them a really nice gift.

Ask them to write another article about plants in the office.

Ask them to come up with some great photos of plants (that you are legally able to distribute as screensavers, branded lightly with your domain) and give them to people.

Advertise the new article about plants on the popular page, advertise the screen saver on your popular page.

I don't think that you are going to kill a software giant with irrelevant articles but I believe from experience that they can be very helpful to your rankings. Plus, we make a few sales every month to people who landed on our website to consume irrelevant content - and the products that we sell are irrelevant to the content and damn few people want what is sold on that site.

crichardson1992

Thanks for such a thorough and thoughtful response Tom

BlueprintMarketing

I Strongly Suggest **YOU DO NOT REDIRECT TO THE HOMEPAGE the Only Way You're Going to Keep the Backlinks From Not Being Devalued by Google is to Add HR Content With the Plant ** CONTENT OR HAVE A VERY RELEVANT ALMOST IDENTICAL PAGE TO REDIRECT TO.

Sorry for the very long post. I just found this and realized it explained everything very clearly.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/301-redirects/

"IMPORTANT

Redirecting pages to somewhere relevant is key. Google treats irrelevant 301 redirects as soft 404’s, so there’s no real advantage of redirecting unless you’re doing so to a similar and relevant page.

Google’s John Mueller explains more in this video. https://youtu.be/nIDZmac_rMI

If you don’t have a similar or relevant page, and you still have a 404 page with lots of high-quality backlinks then, honestly, it may be worth republishing the content that used to exist at that location.

Think of it like this:

If the dead page was valuable enough to attract high-quality backlinks in the first place, then it’s worth questioning why it no longer exists. I mean, it’s clearly a topic people are interested"

John Mueller
Google

Redirect Bad Practices

1. Redirecting All 404 Broken URLs to the Home Page

This case often happens when you are lazy to investigate all of your 404 URLs and map them to the appropriate landing page.

Cite: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/technical-seo/redirects/

"According to Google, they are still all treated as 404s.

@JohnMu Replying to @p3sn @jdevalk

Yeah, it's not a great practice (confuses users), and we mostly treat them as 404s anyway (they're soft-404s), so there's no upside. It's not critically broken/bad, but additional complexity for no good reason - make a better 404 page instead.

20 5:10 AM - Jan 8, 2019If you have too many pages like this, you should consider creating beautiful 404 pages and engage users to browse further or find something other than what they were looking for by displaying a search option."

It is strongly recommended by Google that redirected page content should be equivalent to the old page. Otherwise, such redirect may be considered as soft 404 and you will lose the rank of that page."
If you do anything do not redirect to the homepage that would be the worst possible outcome.
Doing that with simply create a soft for for for all your backlinks and they will be devalued by Google.
In order to continue to read the benefits of your 500 root domains pointing to your plant URL you should
Start writing about your software's User interface keeps people Relaxed. That business will grow? Spend one week with a memo in the entire office saying we will get $500 to whoever rewrites this the best way it will be done very well I promise.
link from it to one of the pages that you need the most boost with most needed pages**,**
Simply add this type of information into what you already have. I'm not going to say it's going to be the easiest thing but it will help your site. If you'd like some help I'm happy to have one of my Writers come up with something that would work
You should also take the rewriting/merging of two pages as an opportunity to better serve search intent and give searchers what they’re looking for. If there are a lot of top 10 lists ranking for the target keyword, make your new revamped post a top 10 list. If there are a lot of how-to guides, well… you get the idea!
NOTE. That has nothing to do with 301 redirects, but it’s worth doing if you want to maximize the ROI of your efforts.
Publish your revamped page and implement the 301 redirect(s)
Now it’s finally time to publish your revamped post/page.
If either of the old URLs is a good match for your new post, then feel free to republish at the same URL. You can then delete the other post/page and add a 301 redirect to the new post.
You may recall that’s what we did with our_ skyscraper technique_ post. We reused the /skyscraper-technique/ URL.
If neither of the old URLs is a good match for your new post/page, then it’s also perfectly fine to 301 redirect both pages to a totally new URL.
**I would concentrate on HR's role in keeping people happy and barely breathe clean. You have so much ammunition use it **About how you're trying to actually help people's mental state.
Human resources provide care for workers and make sure that they are healthy and have a good mental state. You do everything you can to try to keep people from getting sick and making sure that they are happy plants are doing the same thing this is a slam dunk you can make this very very HR with plants. Do you want to get a real lot of attention do you your own COVID-19 and plants in your home office or workplace study****

Information that is positive about plants and working.
You Have so much good stuff that you can mix.
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/how-hr-provides-career-help-4125267

Work Environment

**Example: **While performing the responsibilities of the job, these work environment characteristics are representative of the environment the job holder will encounter. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable people with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the job.

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is occasionally exposed to moving mechanical parts and vehicles. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate. The passage of employees through the work area is average and normal.

Benefits of Plants in the Home Office

Research shows that plants improve air quality, health, mood, and productivity. Here’s how:

Air Filter: Research from NASA shows that plants can remove toxins from the air. Don’t think you have harmful chemicals in your office? Think again. Chemicals are found in furniture, carpets, pen and printer ink and more.
**Improved Health: **Research from Norway (PDF) indicates that plants can reduce illness rates, including ailments such as a headaches, dry eyes, cough, and more. Plants are also natural humidifiers, which can reduce incidents of dry skin, sore throat, and dry coughs.
**Mood Enhancer: **Office plants can reduce stress, boost mood, and improve perceptions of the workspace (make it a more appealing place to be).
Increased Productivity: It goes without saying that good health and attitude leads to good productivity. Research suggests that plants also increase alertness and attentiveness, which is important to getting things done, as well. A Texas A&M study showed plants can improve creativity, another important factor in productivity.

in addition, you should probably look at some of the research and consider what HR does and you are providing a beneficial service for people in offices as well as for her people working at home during a pandemic. Make sure you use COVID-19Update the content to reflect the home office and then add a bit of your software into the content in a very clean and easily made relevant method.

Talk about how your company cares about workers this is in fact advice and it is actually beneficial to them at this time. This is not taking away from your site and overpowering your other pages.

THIS IS JUST ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO MIX ONE AND TWO TOGETHER.

I know I added a lot of content here and I'm sorry that I did that. But I want you to understand that you can combine these two things because human resources and healthy workplaces go hand-in-hand and so dose the prevention of Covid-19 and plants clean the air

Do not We direct the plant page to the homepage. Combined the plant URL Content with something HR and publish it.

I hope this was of help

Tom

CKCvMvZ.png

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.