One of my sites is over 5 year old and ranks very well for majority of keywords in its nichie
the problem is that the content has not been updated in years
the site is currently static html, I was thinking about migrating it onto wordpress and allow users to submit content than I can have two sections like the newest section and most recommended section based on user votes
do you think it is a good idea? will it help in further improving my rankings ? or should I leave it as it is, why mend it when it isn’t broken ?
To keep your good ranking, you have to work on your site. Anything that adds QUALITY, UNIQUE content to your site is a good thing. Remember, there are plenty of people behind you who are vying for your spot in the rankings.
Sure, steer clear of radical changes if you can, and ensure that the redirects are 301’s, you reinforce the redirects with a canonical link element and an XML sitemap referencing the new URLs.
There’s many benefits to having a CMS to power your site and enable it to be updated. With WordPress you can take advantage of RSS, PubSubHubbub and Pinging, dynamic XML sitemaps and other components to get your content recognized faster by the search engines to leverage changes in their algorithms such as QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) and blended search, time-based search for articles etc.
Remember that your competitors are most likely looking to out rank your for your keywords, so they won’t be sitting on their hands.
The most important thing to remember when migrating from a static site to a dynamic site is to change as little of the front-end as possible. This means keeping your URLs the same structure and ensuring your redirects are in place, keeping the same titles, the same layout, the same content etc. At least initially until the search engines have had time to recrawl the new site.
Too many people jump in and take the opportunity to change other things that a CMS allows them to do, then they don’t know which change caused what.