What to do with outdated and irrelevant content on a website?

[Intergaz]

Hi everyone,

On our corporate website we have a blog where we publish articles which are directly related to our company (house heating systems and gas cylinders) and some articles which are completely irrelevant to our core business, but which might be of interest to our potential clients.

Recently I've been told that it is not a good idea to include these not directly related posts to our core business, because Google might be somewhat confused at to what our core business is all about. I was advised to research this topic and think of completely removing blog posts that are irrelevant to our core business from our blog. By removing I mean completely removing pages and setting a 410 status to tell Google that it is not a 404 error but that these pages were intentionally removed.

I would like to hear some independent advice from Moz community as to what I should do?

Thank you very much in advance.

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[RossKernez]

Hi there,

I would only keep the content that is related to the business unless you are getting a lot of traffic from these articles that are not related to heating systems and gas cylinders.  Getting traffic it is always good to show Google that your site is interested enough to get visitors. If you decide to remove these blog posts, I would check if any of these irrelevant posts have any backlinks before you remove them. If they do have some links should try to redirect them to relevant pages that you would on your site or just keep them because of the high-quality links. It is a good idea to set up these deleted pages to 410 ( Page Gone)  so Google will remove from the index much faster.

[Intergaz]

Hi Ross,

Thank you very much for your reply. This is exactly what I've done - I decided to delete all these irrelevant blog posts from our website and assigned a 410 status to them with custom page for users who land on any of these pages to make the user experience a little bit better.

Thanks for taking your time to answer my question

Alex

[RossKernez]

You are welcome!

Ross