Redirect entire website or not?

[tah06]

I have 2 websites:

• a UK health blog covering a wide range of topics (professional medical advice, diets, mental health), core business, strong brand, content ranks well, lots of valuable traffic, only 100 external links but all of good quality. We also sell some of our UK consultancy services on the site.
• small niche blog just covering fitness, every page has robots=noindex, 100x more traffic, 100% of traffic is from 500,000 external links on other websites talking about fitness matters (these range from spam to medium quality) , 95% of traffic is from countries we cannot serve, probably only 1% of the remaining 5% of traffic would be considered our target market, but the main concern is that the content is very out of date and should anyone see, it would be damaging to the UK health blog

My dilemma is what do we do with the fitness website to make most business use, while ensuring little maintenance?

Suggestions have been:

1. Keep fitness blog running but make very basic content updates and remove robots=noindex
2. Redirect fitness website urls to appropriate pages on UK health website

We are on the verge of choosing option 2 but I have some SEO concerns about the impact of the redirects on the UK health website.

Due to the volume of external links which mostly all reference 'fitness', is there any risk through redirects that Google might start thinking the UK health website is just about fitness? If so, is there any way to prevent this through certain redirects eg 307?

Also with the fitness website having some spam related external links, is there any risk to the UK health website if these aren't disavowed before redirects are setup? If so, on which website should these be done?

Thanks!

[Dalerio-Consulting]

I would first like to clarify that the redirect of the users from the fitness website to the main health website will not damage the SEO and rankings of the main health website.

However, since you are saying that the traffic is mostly international and only 1-5% of the users would actually be useful for the UK blog, I would rather suggest that you keep both websites, put minimal efforts and content on the fitness website and also indexing it, and you can find other ways to use (monetize) the rest of the traffic. For UK clients, you can put some banners, paid ads or referring articles to bring traffic and add credibility to the main site. you can also set it so that the banners show up only for the UK visitors.

As mentioned, doing a 301 redirect from the fitness website to the main health website won't harm your rankings, and if you aren't willing to give the effort of minimally maintaining the fitness blog you can also have an agency managing it for you and monetizing the foreign traffic.

Daniel Rika - Dalerio Consulting
https://dalerioconsulting.com/
info@dalerioconsulting.com