Removing 1000s of pages at once

could it trigger a penalty?

[frakilk]

Hi all, wanted to get your thoughts on something. I have a medium-size community and last year I added a custimized datafeed store to it resulting in 1000s of new pages indexed for my site. It performed really well last year but this year the datafeed page rankings collapsed and therefore I am considering removing it from my site.

Now if I remove it Google will come along and suddenly find more then half of my site has disappeared. Could this trigger a penalty? The datafeed store gets very poor traffic but the rest of my site (forums and blogs) is ranking well. I am thinking that if I remove these datafeed pages (i.e. low quality pages, duplicate content) that it may actually benefit my site.

Thoughts?