Delete old articles or perform redirect to the new one covering the same topic?

Question

In my site, I had noticed that I have 2 old articles for the same topic but diffrent content as below:

Data Migration Part 1
Data Migration part 2

Now I have a new article that already published with Data Migration but also has different content!
Now what should I do?

Redirect the 2 old articles to the new one.
Set the Canonical URL for the old articles to the new article.
Delete 2 old articles
Leave the 3 articles (Is it considered duplicate content or keyword cannibalization?)

I Capulet · Accepted Answer

Take the two older articles, update both of them with references to the new article (e.g. add an editor's note with a link to the new article to each), make sure that the modified dates for the old articles' URLs on the site's XML sitemap reflect the update, and leave the canonical tags as self-referencing. I suggest this other method because 301 redirects work best to pass "SEO juice" (sort of a unreal concept to begin with but whatever) when the previous content at the start URL is near identical to the new content at the target URL. Since you said that only the topic is the same between all three and that the new one is published already, it would be better to simply work with interlinks.

Correct answer by I Capulet on October 25, 2020

Delete old articles or perform redirect to the new one covering the same topic?

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