New professional blog; should I redirect from my personal blog, or leave content both places?

Question

I've been an on-and-off (mostly off) blogger for years, mixing personal interest and professional topics on a personal blog.

I've recently created a new professional website where I duplicated the old posts related to my profession.

Should I remove the duplicated blog posts from my personal blog, with a redirect to the professional blog?

Or can/should I perhaps add some meta tags, on the personal blog, that tell search engines that the authoritative version lives at my new professional blog?

My ideal scenario would be to leave the personal blog alone, but to have search engines direct to the professional blog for the posts that exist on both the places. But I'm not sure if this is possible, or if there are any drawbacks that I haven't considered.

Answer 1

Removing the content altogether will be a loss of the SEO and rankings gained by the pages throughout the lifetime of the content.

Instead of removing it, you can set up canonical tags on the copied content pages to point towards the pages with the original content.

Follow this Google Webmasters Blog on canonicalization.