Question about my sidebar and featured posts

I currently have 4 or 5 posts pinned to my sidebar, which of course show up on every page of the site.

I am thinking of grabbing a plugin (unless someone teaches me to do it without one) and having those featured posts show up in the appropriate category for the post. My blog is pretty general so my 4 featured posts are different niches.

For SEO purposes is it better to change and only have the posts show up in the sidebar of the category they belong?

For example on my sidebar the 4 featured posts are "My favorite cars", "The Best Restaurant I ever visited", "Logitech headset review" and "7 ways to improve your bench press"

They all will still be on the homepage if I make the change but then as people find the site and land on different pages they will only see featured posts related to their category. The question is, will Google reduce the ranking of those pages which are currently getting a little bit of juice from the whole site. Or will Google value the content more since it is only getting juice from the same niche within the site?

Thoughts?

My thought is that by using your sidebar to display relevant posts instead of generic ones you will reduce your bounce rate and this will positively impact your rankings.

In fact, I know it will because I’ve done it.

If you need a plugin, I use Content Aware Sidebars.

The plugin you need to filter your posts in WordPress is "Popular Posts - By Webline" & then "Conditional Widgets" I use it on a few sites, and you can set up rules quite easily to have related posts in matching categories.