Resurrecting a heavily duplicated Joomla website.

[SkiBum]

The site in question is stanwix.info.

I set this up years ago as a community project before I had even heard of seo.  It carries quite a bit of content but has appallingly "SEO Unfriendly" URLs  some content is recorded as duplicate 3 or more times because of these dynamic URLs according to the crawl statistics returned by SEO Moz.

Currently it ranks well for the keyword stanwix - not too surprising as the only significant local competition is a large commercial holiday complex located several miles away out on the coast.

As a sort of showcase, I have been trying to come up with a strategy to re-optimise stanwix.info so that it can outdo the commercial site stanwix.com  I am pretty sure that step 1 involcves upgrading from the current archaic version of Joomla to the latest release even though that will break some of the modules currently installed. My pal who actually coded the site did a fair bit of hacking of the modules to get them to work properly.

OR

do I simply bin it and start a fresh site consigning years worth of community content to the darkness and replace with fresh material - I'm not keen on this option as I have put a lot of heart and soul into this project.   I am in a quandary here as the problems are so numerous that whatever I do will break the site for some time.

The reason I want to keep the site is because the business directory provides a useful locally relevant source of links for other clients and I am also going to set up a separate website for the community centre on a subdomain - this time running in wordpress which I do have a fair bit of experience with.

Your advice for my addled brain would be much appreciated.

[Highland]

Here are my suggestions

1. While upgrading software is typically a good thing, it sounds like you're possibly going to break things by doing it (I would assume we're talking major version changes, not patch levels). I would make sure of what you're going to break before doing it. At least make a test copy somewhere and monkey with it there. NEVER "tinker" with your live site.
2. There are scripts that can export Joomla sites. If you do switch software, be meticulous in your 301s or take a ranking bath.
3. Canonical your site. That will fix the duplicate problem easily.
4. Why Wordpress? Consider a forum instead. A forum invites conversation and natively creates fresh content.