What to do with very old pages

leave alone, or ruthlessly exploit

[roddy]

Back in 2003 I set up a little hobby site, with maybe 40 or so pages of decent content. Set up a forum in a subdirectory, the forum did quite well and around the end of the year I moved it to its own domain, with the content site shifting to a subdirectory there.

Those pages of notepad-coded HTML have basically sat there, untouched. I stuck Adsense ads on them at some point, but beyond that I haven't done any link requests, added any new content, updated anything. They've just sat there.

Taking a look recently, I find that some of the pages are ranking very well for some reasonably valuable search terms. Without getting into specifics eCPM for these pages knocks any of the other pages I run out of the water. It's a niche site so we're not talking massive amounts of traffic or money, but for what it is - it's good.

So what to do? I was thinking of updating the pages (they certainly need it) but don't want to end up accidentally de-optimizing them. I could use the subdirectory for a whole new content site, but are new pages in there going to do so well? There are also non-performing pages which I could try to improve.

Would be interested to hear what others have done in this position? I'm loath to break anything, but surely this would be a better place to start than with a fresh new domain?

[abilitydesigns]

How about adding a blog in new directory on same domain OR may be adding a FAQ section?

That way :
you retain the domain age benefit,
you are not disturbing currently ranking pages, and
you are increasing the chances to capture more long tail queries, IBL's.

- AD