Remove Pages from website and not hurt search engine rankings

[raheelonline]

I want to remove a subdomain from my website. The reason is it's not successful and nobody's is using that service. Google has indexed around 5300 pages from that subdomain. What's the best bet to remove the subdomain and still not hurt the search engines/google?

[Ace]

I don't think Search Engines/Google will be hurt by any means if you remove your sub-domain. If you think its not useful then remove it, but my personal suggestion is to make it useful so that both visitors as well as search likes your sub-domain.

[innominds]

If the domain/sub-domain is not useful to you then remove it.
Think whether if that sub-domain is really giving any value to your visitors or not.

[seopeter]

You need to check if you have any internal linking from those pages which are indexed on any anchor text....if so, u need to double check before removing OR if they are standalone page, you can remove those

[morestar]

If you have 5300 pages on your sub-domain there MUST be something useful there for your users.

I personally wouldn't dare remove all those pages - that was a lot of work...but I would do as Ace said and make the content [more] useful...

[raheelonline]

Actually it's a video sharing script on the subdomain. Recently i realized as i should leave the video sharing for Youtube and focus on the core service of my website which is consumer reviews. I want to remove these additional services and revamp the website with proper SEO and marketing strategies.

I'm thinking about to do a 301 redirect on all the pages i which to remove and send the users to the homepage of the website. I guess this way once google removes all the subdomain pages from it's index, i'll then delete the entire subdomain and pages contained.

[morestar]

See I worry about doing mass-redirects to one page, even a home page because especially in this case, the replacing page (homepage) cannot be fully considered relevant to the page that was redirecting.

I use 301s to redirect to new pages with the same content, better content and so forth but with different page names or locations.

That's fine that you're giving the spiders and users a new place to land other than a 404 but in my experience it's a bit of a disappointment landing on the home page after I thought I found what I was looking for.

Will people still be able to find the video sharing script on the homepage?

[dozzn]

Originally Posted by Ace

I don't think Search Engines/Google will be hurt by any means if you remove your sub-domain. If you think its not useful then remove it, but my personal suggestion is to make it useful so that both visitors as well as search likes your sub-domain.

there are only a few options, and I agree with this one. make it useful, don't remove it...

[claybutler]

Wow. 5,300 pages indexed. Must be doing something right. I agree with everyone. Don't make any rash decisions and try to turn those already indexed pages into something useful. If you do need to trim the fat then do it in stages and monitor the results. Even if it doesn't end up performing the way you like, it will be in invaluable learning experience that doesn't put you at risk. I wish I had 5,300 extra pages lying around to experiment with.