Redirect 301 multiple pages to one. Is that ok?

Question

Google

Hi guys!
Decided to clean the site from the old pages. These are such old mini-news notes that are more than 10 years old and no one needs them. Traffic on them is less than 1% of site traffic. I would just drop them, however, I don't want to lose the weight they may have. Moreover, there are ~ 2000 of them (only ~ 11000 pages on the site).
For example, there are 30 very similar pages with a note about updating a computer program (about 1000 characters each). There are 200 characters of unique text, and 800 is a description, which is always the same. Is it okay to remove them all and put a 301 redirect through .htaccess on a single page with material about this program?
And how to do it? Is it possible to redirect 30 pages to one with one post? Or do you need 30 separate records?
Or is 401 or 404 better?
Thank you!

Answer 1

You can, in principle, not bother with these materials, by and large.
A 301 redirect from thirty materials to one is quite ok (better than 4xx) and does not promise any special problems.
But if I were you, I would carefully check again if among these old materials there is something especially popular and valuable from the user's point of view, with a large number of views, etc. If such materials are found, I would make a canonical from them to the very material that you wanted to redirect to. Here.