What to do with 40 short articles to make room for 5 good thorough ones

[BobGW]

Hello,

On my life coaching website, I have 40 articles that I want to replace with 5 good ones (to get up-to-date in modern content writing). The new articles will be long, thorough, and graphically stimulating.

What do I do with all these old short articles. There's no backlinks on them, but they are gaining a little traffic. I'm not sure I want them around since they're not high quality enough. What's normally done?

[ABCPS]

It would seem to me that if your 40 articles material is covered by the 5 good articles, then you might want to delete them if you are more concerned about maintaining a higher editorial level to attract/maintain customers..

But if you are more concerned with traffic content, is there any reason why you can't maintain all the articles using  different keywords?

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, so this is a bit confusing... you want to publish the same information in the 5 new articles that you have in the 40 short articles? If this is the case then idea is to 301 old articles to the new one so that you don’t lose traffic. There should be no debate about the link juice as you said there is no link pointing to those pages...

But if the information is different and the previous 40 short articles have different information then the 5 new once then in that case leave them as it is if they are not damaging the user experience because it will help you gain a little traffic but if you think there is absolutely no value in those pages and it might hurt the user experience in that case killing the pages is the best idea!

[SoftzSolutions]

Ok, if you are confident that the 5 articles are good enough to cover those 40 articles which are not that great in quality, you can go ahead and delete them and then make a 301 redirection. However, if some of them are having good ranks, I would suggest retaining the article and making changes in the body content. Choice is yours.

[BobGW]

Thanks guys.

I guess I could delete them. If I did keep them where on a site do you put these old articles? I don't want an article section with 45 articles in it, I want one with 5 articles in it.