Unpublishing content question

[TheaterMania]

Hi there, a disgruntled ex-employee requested that my company (a large publisher) unpublish a large number of at this point fairly dated articles.

We're going to honor his request. The traffic numbers to these articles aren't significant, but I wanted to understand the SEO ramifications. Two questions:

1. These articles in sum account for 0.51% of site traffic. Will removing them outright cut off just that chunk of traffic? Or will it also affect search rankings for all of our remaining articles?

2. How should we handle unpublished URLs? Is it better to redirect the user to our homepage or a friendly, recirculation-oriented 404?

[EGOL]

Yanking a couple of articles that make up a tiny amount of your traffic should not be a problem unless those articles have a lot of links or other off-site assets or unless those 0.51% of visitors do a lot of buying.

If you are worried about this, have someone write same-topic replacement content and toss it up on the same URL

I bought a domain that had about 25% infringed articles.  I took them down right away and tossed up replacement content and the rankings held.

[BradsDeals]

We yanked a whole bunch more content than that over the last few months.. blog posts that no longer got much traffic and had never really gotten any traction, articles covering topics we'd covered better multiple times, etc. If they were still drawing some traffic, we set up a 301. If there wasn't much of anything happening, we just let it 404. We haven't seen any negative impact from this so far.

I like EGOL's idea of having someone rewrite the content on those pages. If you can't get that done quickly enough to satisfy Mr. Disgruntled, set up some 302s until the new content is ready.

I'd also say that it's probably not worth rewriting unless you're planning to do it better than it was the first time around. If you can't blow it out and make it more valuable, then 301 or 404, whatever, either is probably just fine to wash your hands of it and walk away. Stressing out over one half of one percent when it's not delivering results in the first place isn't going to be worth my time, not when I could be spending that time and effort on something more profitable. Opportunity costs apply.