Active, Old Large site with SEO issues... Fix or Rebuild?

[Millibit]

Looking for opinions and guidance here.  Would sincerely appreciate help.

I started a site long, long ago (1996 to be exact) focused on travel in the US.  The site did very well in the search results up until panda as I built it off templates using public databases to fill in the blanks where I didn't have curated content.  The site currently indexes around 310,000 pages.  I haven't been actively working on the site for years and while user content has kept things somewhat current, I am jumping back into this site as it provides income for my parents (who are retired).

My questions is this.  Will it be easier to track through all my issues and repair, or rebuild as a new site so I can insure everything is in order with today's SEO?

and bonus points for this answer ... how do you handle 301 redirects for thousands of incoming links

Some info to help:

CURRENTLY

• DA is in the low 40s
• some pages still rank on first page of SERPs (long-tail mainly)
• urls are dynamic (I have built multiple versions through the years and the last major overhaul was prior to CMS popularity for this size of site)
• domain is short (4 letters) but not really what I want at this point
• Lots of original content, but oddly that content has been copied by other sites through the years

WHAT I WANT TO DO

• get into a CMS so that anyone can add/curate content without needing tech knowledge
• change to a more relevant domain (I have a different vision)
• remove old, boilerplate content, but keep original

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[Millibit]

Thank you very much for this answer.  What I needed most is a good overall direction to take and you definitely provided that.

I wonder if using canonicals to start 'centralizing' content might be a good way to round up the old versions of the site.  Yes, when I originally built the site it was by hand, each page individual .html and google still indexes those.  I removed them at the start of this journey and ended up with 24k 404s... who knew they were in that long!?

Was great to hear of a similar experience... happy to hear more stories as well.

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