Best way to fix 404 crawl errors caused by Private blog posts in WordPress?

[SEOEND]

Going over Moz Crawl error report and WMT's Crawl errors for a new client site... I found 44 High Priority Crawl Errors = 404 Not Found

I found that those 44 blog pages were set to Private Mode (WordPress theme), causing the 404 issue.
I was reviewing the blog content for those 44 pages to see why those 2010 blog posts, were set to private mode. Well, I noticed that all those 44 blog posts were pretty much copied from other external blog posts. So i'm thinking previous agency placed those pages under private mode, to avoid getting hit for duplicate content issues. All other blog posts posted after 2011 looked like unique content, non scraped.

So my question to all is: What is the best way to fix the issue caused by these 44 pages?

A. Remove those 44 blog posts that used verbatim scraped content from other external blogs.
B. Update the content on each of those 44 blog posts, then set to Public mode, instead of Private.
C. ? (open to recommendations)

I didn't find any external links pointing to any of those 44 blog pages, so I was considering in removing those blog posts. However not sure if that will affect site in anyway.

Open to recommendations before making a decision...
Thanks

[FedeEinhorn]

Hey Alberto,

If those 44 posts are set to "private" how is Moz finding them? Somewhere in your blog you are linking to them. Find those links and take them down.

Then you should consider 2 things:

• Do those pages get any organic traffic? If yes, try to create a page that isn't a copy, with unique and useful content and set it as public.
• If there's no organic traffic, then just leave the 404 and just make sure your 404 is a nicely designed 404 that offers some value to the user. Not only for these 44 pages, but to cover any 404 issue in the future too. You could, for example, check the URL requested and search our site for related content and while saying that the page they were looking for is missing/removed, you suggest looking those other pages.

Hope that helps!