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?

[htdawg]

removing 5000+ pages will have an impact because the pages that were ranking were pulling in some traffic butI am not sure if 301 redirecting all those pages to your homepage or certain related pages in your site wold be all that safe. I could see that for a couple of pages would be ok but 5000, Im not so sure. either way its going to have some effect on your rankings.

[tigger]

>The reason is it's not successful and nobody's is using that service

if no one is using it why not just leave alone and break all links to it, it will then naturally die away