For whatever reason, my client has presented google with an xml sitemap of 25,000 articles, some really junky, some really good. The junky ones get little or no traffic. its #*$!, thin, hopeless content. But roughly 4,000 of them get traffic. The ones that get the majority of traffic have somehow been found, and gather inbound links.

It makes sense to me to

a. Pick out the best articles.
b. Add them to the site's main navigation.

But I am concerned in doing so, some of the pages are going to lose rankings. One such article gets literally tens of thousands of visitors a month. It's a great article but in addition, has 15 inbound links of quality, and the link juice is hoarded on the page.

I think it will be fine, and overall the site will do better. More people will find the quality articles, they will get more links, these quality articles having more link juice will rank higher...

Just curious what others think.