Popular irrelevant blog post, but a lot of traffic - Remove it or Leave It?

[RoosterKath]

A quick question, we've had a hugely popular blog post for quite a while that brings in around 1,000 people a month (Our overall traffic is around 3,000). However, it's completely unrelated to our company and it works simply on the premise of traffic to the website.

However, I've always stuck by if it's not relevant, it shouldn't be there. But I'm worried that if I recommend removing it, and website traffic falls through the floor, it have a huge negative impact and therefore be worse for us to remove it.

Does anyone have any experience with it happening to a website of theirs? Or have any recommendations.

[engine]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld RoosterKath

However, I've always stuck by if it's not relevant, it shouldn't be there. But I'm worried that if I recommend removing it, and website traffic falls through the floor, it have a huge negative impact and therefore be worse for us to remove it.

If you're worried about losing traffic, don't remove it. However, i'd question the validity of the traffic for the site in question. If it's traffic that will have no interest in the rest of the site, it's of no value from a traffic point of view.
Of course, if it's highly cited externally it'll be giving a boost to the site overall, so the main site might lose some ranking, and thereby some traffic. It does depend on how the main site it profiled, too.

There is no easy answer.

If you do move it, make sure you have all relevant redirects in place to the new home.

[topr8]

..it's of no value from a traffic point of view

in which case make it of value, i'd get the company to join the adsense program ... and put ads at the bottom of that post (there's no reason to serve ads anywhere else), the company may well earn some income from it.

otherwise, personally i'd leave it - it does you know harm and 1,000 visits a month is not putting a strain on the server or your bandwidth allocation i shouldn't think.

[keyplyr]

Hi RoosterKath and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

[RoosterKath]

Thank you all for the feedback! I think we will just stay put as it's not causing any harm and it's keeping our visitor numbers high. I was worried that Google might see the types of searches that people are coming through to us from and rank us down on other queries because of the type of traffic.

The post itself does not bring in any value as it's simply a how to convert a document to another type of document. Also all the traffic comes from the US and we are focusing on a UK audience.

We recently changed our domain and are hesitant to change too much that will affect our rankings, however, when I look on SEMRush to do some competitor analysis, we are seen as competing against the likes of Prezi and Youtube.