[help] how to bring a dying site back to life?

Hey guys,

7 years ago I created a bigger directory, once the PR was 5, today 4... I am using Adsense on it, it is my only income site. But unfortunately the site is getting less and less visitors. I didn't update the site for 5 years - so no wonder.. but anyhow I see a dramatic decrease since 2 months. - the site had 5k/day visitors 2 months ago, now it gets 3k - decreasing.

I would like to bring the site back to life somehow, I would write a new highly seo optimized directory system (now I am using old "Indexu").

BUT. I am scared of losing my rankings and my entire adsense income after the major update.

What do you think? What should I do to not lose, but keep / win visitors? but not blackhat, I never did any PR except adding the site to google.. And since I didnt change anything on the site, I don't know why I am losing visitors.

Thx,

Maybe do a competition, but considering the kind of site it is, do some link building, post up on forums, offer free links in it. Stuff like that...

Add a section where people can submit their articles with backlinks for free - all in categories and your traffic will explode.

if you can convert your current db into phpld will be great ... don't be scared about changes , even if you maybe at first update you will see 1 point of pr going down , you will recover it easy at next one .