What is the impact of an off-topic page to other pages on the site?

[Matthew_Edgar]

We are working with a client who has one irrelevant, off-topic post ranking incredibly well and driving a lot of traffic. However, none of the other pages on the site, that are relevant to this client's business, are ranking. Links are good and in-line with competitors for the various terms. Oddly, very few external links reference this off-topic post, most are to the home page. Local profile is also in-line with competitors, including reviews, categorization, geo-targeting, pictures, etc. No spam issues exist and no warnings in Google Search Console. The only thing that seems weird is this off-topic post but that could affect rankings on other pages of the site? Would removing that off-topic post potentially help increase traffic and rankings for the other more relevant pages of the site? Appreciate any and all help or ideas of where to go from here. Thanks!

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi Matthew,

Our job as SEOs is to try and get authority for a website on keywords relevant to their niche. We do that by using related topics on blog, on-page SEO with right title, Headers, content on the pages etc.

We analyze the results on SERPs, organic keyword traffics in analytics etc., to understand whether our strategy is becoming successful and google is looking at us the way we are projecting ourselves.

In your situation, it seems accidentally you have got traffic and ranks for not so relevant keywords, google will look at your website as an authority website for keywords related to this off-topic page (since other pages are not ranked).

How to overcome this situation, you can find solution here :
https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday
https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

As Rand Fishkin has rightly suggested, you would have to let go of off-topic page ranks along with doing the right steps to ranks right topics.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Vijay